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Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0, Open Access
Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0, Open
Journal article
Primary health care case management through the lens of complexity: an exploratory study of naturopathic practice using complexity science principles
BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, Vol.22(1), pp.1-14
15/04/2022
PMID: 35428262
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Abstract
Background: Advances in systems science creates an opportunity to bring a complexity perspective to health care practices and research. While medical knowledge has greatly progressed using a reductionist and mechanistic philosophy, this approach may be limited in its capacity to manage chronic and complex illness. With its holistic foundation, naturopathy is a primary health profession with a purported alignment with a complexity perspective. As such this pilot study aimed to investigate the application of complexity science principles, strategies, and tools to primary health care using naturopathy as a case study.
Methods: A network mapping and analysis of the naturopathic case management process was conducted. Mind maps were created by naturopathic practitioners to reflect their clinical conceptualisation of a common paper clinical case. These mind maps were inputed into Gephi, a network mapping, exploration, and analysis software. Various layouts of the data were produced, and these were analysed using exploratory data analysis and computational network analysis.
Results: Seven naturopathic practitioners participated in the study. In the combined network mapping, 133 unique elements and 399 links were identified. Obesity, the presenting issue in the case, was centrally located. Along with obesity, other keystone elements included: systemic inflammation, dysbiosis, diet, the liver, and mood. Each element was connected on average to 3.05 other elements, with a degree variation between one and 36. Six communities within the dataset were identified, comprising: the nervous system and mood, gastroinstetinal and dietary factors, systemic inflammation and obesity, the endocrine system and metabolism.
Conclusions: This pilot study demonstrates that it is feasible to apply a complexity science perspective to investigating primary health care case management. This supports a shift to viewing the human organism as a complex adaptive system within primary health care settings, with implications for health care practices that are more cognisant with the treatment of chronic and complex conditions and research opportunities to capture the complex clinical reasoning processes of practitioners.
Details
- Title
- Primary health care case management through the lens of complexity: an exploratory study of naturopathic practice using complexity science principles
- Creators
- Kim D Graham - University of Technology SydneyAmie Steel - University of Technology SydneyJon Wardle - Southern Cross University
- Publication Details
- BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, Vol.22(1), pp.1-14
- Publisher
- BioMed Central Ltd.
- Grant note
- Funding support for this study was received from Endeavour College of Natural Medicine, Australia.
- Identifiers
- 991013013057102368
- Copyright
- © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Academic Unit
- National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article