"We have been concerned by the lack of regulation of cosmetic procedures, including regulation about equipment and sterilising as well as accreditation of premises and the qualifications of the practitioners".
Within the last years certification systems have increasingly been established to foster the education and qualifications of healing practitioners [ 11].
Table 2 examines the effect of years since qualification on practitioners' beliefs relating to EBM.
"Patients and physicians who use YouTube for educational purposes should be aware that these videos can present biased information, be unbalanced when evaluating risks versus benefits and be unclear about the qualifications of the practitioner," Boris Paskhover, lead author and an assistant professor at Rutgers New Jersey said in a press release.
Criteria for diagnosis, numbers of treatments, co-morbid conditions, psychosocial status, coping strategies for pain, prior trauma, qualifications of the practitioner, longitudinal follow-up, and changes in quality-of-life and overall function are not reported.
Exposure variables from this data source were: age, gender and country of primary medical qualification of general practitioners, and the number of general practitioners per practice (full time equivalent).
So, while some participants talked about being "impressed" by formal qualifications, others were more dismissive of practitioners' formal qualifications because of the difficulties for patients in knowing if or to what extent these were recognized and by whom.
The outcome variables were classified as follows: 'Appropriate care'Appropriateand and prompt care' and 'prompt care' based on the type of facility and qualification of the practitioner from whom the care was sought and also time interval elapsed from the recognition of illness until the care was sought/given.
The women identified four predominant influences on their choice of practitioner for back pain: familiarity with treatment or experiences with individual practitioners; recommendations from social networks; geographical proximity of practitioners; and, qualifications and credentials of practitioners.
However, there have been no standardized approaches to length of training, curriculum for general practitioners, qualifications of trainers or mechanism of training published in the literature.
