Institute of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, National Yang Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Tohoku J Exp Med. 2009 Nov;219(3):207-14. doi: 10.1620/tjem.219.207.
Healthy physicians are critical to the quality of care for patients. There is a common trend in Chinese societies seeking for medical treatments from Chinese medicine physicians. However, there are limited studies that investigated the health status for the Chinese medicine physicians. In this report, we used National Health Insurance Research database of Taiwan between 1998 and 2002 to compare the morbidities between Chinese medicine physicians and general population. The number of Chinese medicine physicians in this study is 6,143 (5,036 males with the mean age of 40.47 years and 1,107 females with the mean age of 36.24 years), and the number of the referent subjects is 24,576, randomly selected from the database matching by sex and age. We found that the Chinese medicine physicians have lower all-causes morbidity (86% vs. 95%, p < 0.001), except that female Chinese medicine physicians had significantly higher rates of complications of pregnancy, childbirth, and puerperium than female population. Such an exception might reflect a consequence of maternal age effect. The odds ratio between all causes and two comparison groups was 0.36 (95% CI: 0.33, 0.40), indicating that the Chinese medicine physicians have much lower disease risk. Higher education, better socioeconomic status, and good knowledge in medicine (possible self-treatment) may explain the observed differences. Among the Chinese medicine physicians, the morbidity rate of male subjects is lower than the female subjects (85.9% vs. 91.4%, p < 0.001). This study will provide the helpful information in guiding future investigations about health hazards to the practice of Chinese medicine.
健康的医生对于患者的医疗质量至关重要。在中国社会，人们普遍倾向于寻求中医医师的治疗。然而，针对中医医师健康状况的研究有限。在本报告中，我们使用了台湾 1998 年至 2002 年的全民健康保险研究数据库，比较了中医医师与一般人群的发病率。本研究中中医医师的数量为 6143 人（男性 5036 人，平均年龄为 40.47 岁，女性 1107 人，平均年龄为 36.24 岁），参照对象的数量为 24576 人，从数据库中按性别和年龄随机抽取。我们发现，除了女性中医医师在妊娠、分娩和产褥期并发症方面的发病率明显高于女性人群外，中医医师的总发病率较低（86%对 95%，p<0.001）。这种例外可能反映了产妇年龄的影响。所有原因与两个比较组之间的优势比为 0.36（95%置信区间：0.33，0.40），表明中医医师的疾病风险较低。较高的教育水平、较好的社会经济地位和良好的医学知识（可能自我治疗）可能解释了观察到的差异。在中医医师中，男性的发病率低于女性（85.9%对 91.4%，p<0.001）。本研究将为指导未来对中医实践的健康危害的研究提供有价值的信息。
