Most Pediatricians Want Herbal Medicine Training, Survey Finds

Herbal remedies occupy a curious position in modern pediatrics. Families use them, pharmacies stock them, and online communities promote them relentlessly, yet the physicians who care for children have rarely been asked, in a systematic way, what they actually think about plant-based therapy. A new cross-sectional survey from Türkiye, published in BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, offers one of the most detailed quantitative portraits to date of how pediatricians view phytotherapy, the use of plant-derived preparations for therapeutic purposes. The results reveal a profession that is largely untrained in herbal medicine but strikingly open to learning about it, with attitudes shaped less by age, gender, or career stage than by education, certification, and personal experience with herbal products.

The study, led by Nevin Cambaz Kurt of the Department of Pediatrics at Başakşehir Çam and Sakura City Hospital in Istanbul, together with colleagues from hospitals and universities across Türkiye, set out to fill a well-defined gap. Although interest in herbal products and complementary medicine for pediatric patients has grown steadily, the authors note that pediatricians’ attitudes toward phytotherapy and the factors driving those attitudes remained insufficiently characterized. To address this, the team recruited 206 physicians practicing in pediatric care through professional communication networks and online platforms, using convenience sampling, and measured their views with a structured psychometric instrument rather than ad hoc questions.

That instrument was a modified 22-item version of the Attitude Scale for Phytotherapy Practices, a questionnaire designed to quantify where a clinician falls on a spectrum from skepticism to enthusiasm about plant-based treatment. The researchers subjected the scale to rigorous statistical scrutiny. Internal consistency, the degree to which items measuring the same underlying construct produce similar responses, was assessed with Cronbach’s alpha, and the modified scale returned an exceptionally high value of 0.966, well above the conventional 0.70 threshold for reliability. Exploratory factor analysis, a technique that examines whether groups of items cluster around shared latent dimensions, supported a dominant general factor structure, meaning the scale behaves as a coherent measure of a single overall attitude rather than a loose collection of unrelated opinions.

The demographic profile of the sample reflects the modern pediatric workforce in Türkiye. Of the 206 participants, 144 were women, representing 69.9 percent of respondents, and the largest age group was 30 to 40 years old, accounting for 42.7 percent. Against this backdrop, the headline numbers on training are stark. Only 5.3 percent of the pediatricians surveyed held any formal phytotherapy certificate, meaning roughly one in twenty had structured credentials in the field. Yet when asked whether they wanted such education, 66.0 percent said yes. That gap, between barely any formal training and a two-thirds majority hungry for it, is arguably the single most consequential finding of the study, because it suggests demand for evidence-based herbal medicine instruction that current pediatric curricula are not meeting.

The mean total phytotherapy attitude score across the sample was 75.99, with a standard deviation of 16.79, indicating a moderately positive average attitude with substantial spread between individuals. The more interesting question is what predicts where a given pediatrician falls within that spread. To answer it, the researchers turned to multivariable linear regression, a statistical method that estimates the independent contribution of each predictor while holding the others constant. The model adjusted for demographic and professional characteristics and produced a result that is unusually strong for survey research of this kind: the adjusted model explained 55.4 percent of the variance in attitude scores, a proportion of explained variation that few psychosocial models achieve.

Three factors emerged as independent predictors of more favorable attitudes toward phytotherapy. The first was possession of a phytotherapy certificate, which was associated with an increase of 7.99 points on the attitude scale, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.76 to 14.23 and a p-value of 0.012. The second, and by far the largest, was a stated desire to receive phytotherapy education, which added 14.60 points on average, with a confidence interval of 10.58 to 18.62 and a p-value below 0.001. The third was the frequency with which a physician used phytotherapy for themselves or close relatives, contributing 5.05 points per unit increase in frequency, with a confidence interval of 2.94 to 7.17 and a p-value below 0.001. Notably absent from the list of significant predictors were the demographic and professional variables that often dominate such analyses.

This pattern carries a clear interpretive message: what pediatricians know, want to know, and have personally experienced with herbal medicine matters far more than who they are. Attitudes toward phytotherapy were associated mainly with educational interest, certification status, and experiential familiarity rather than demographic or professional characteristics alone, the authors conclude. The finding that a desire for education is such a powerful predictor is statistically interesting in itself, since it raises the possibility of a feedback loop: physicians who already view herbal medicine favorably are the ones most likely to seek training, which in turn reinforces favorable attitudes. The researchers addressed this concern with a sensitivity analysis, reported in supplementary material, that re-ran the regression model excluding the desire for phytotherapy education, a standard robustness check for a predictor that may be conceptually entangled with the outcome.

The methodological apparatus of the study deserves attention because it signals a level of statistical care that is not always present in survey-based complementary medicine research. The authors report using a heteroscedasticity-consistent covariance estimator, specifically the HC3 variant, which makes regression standard errors robust to uneven variance in the residuals, a common problem in Likert-scale survey data. They also report variance inflation factors, used to detect multicollinearity among predictors, and interquartile ranges alongside standard deviations for descriptive statistics. The study was reported in accordance with the STROBE guidelines, the widely used checklist for strengthening the reporting of observational studies, and was approved by the Van Training and Research Hospital Clinical Research Ethics Committee with electronic informed consent obtained from all participants in line with the Declaration of Helsinki.

As with any cross-sectional survey, there are limits to how far the findings can be generalized. The sample of 206 physicians was recruited through convenience sampling, which means participants may be more engaged with the topic of complementary medicine than the average pediatrician, potentially inflating both attitude scores and expressed demand for education. The survey captures attitudes at a single point in time, so the causal direction between experience, education, and attitude cannot be definitively established. The study was also conducted entirely within Türkiye, and attitudes toward herbal medicine are known to vary across cultures and health systems, shaped by national traditions, regulatory frameworks, and the availability of herbal products. The authors themselves frame their conclusions carefully, emphasizing associations rather than causal claims.

Even with those caveats, the practical implications are hard to ignore. If two-thirds of pediatricians want structured phytotherapy education while fewer than six percent have any formal certification, then children’s doctors are being asked questions about herbal teas, plant extracts, and supplements that most have never been trained to answer, in an environment where families are already using these products regardless of physician guidance. The authors argue that their findings support the integration of evidence-based, safety-oriented, and clinically oriented phytotherapy content into pediatric education. That framing matters: the goal they describe is not to promote herbal medicine but to ensure that the physicians on the front lines of child health can evaluate it with the same rigor they apply to any other therapy, distinguishing preparations with genuine evidence from those with only marketing behind them. In a medical landscape where patient demand for complementary therapies shows no sign of slowing, that may be the most sensible prescription of all.

Subject of Research: Pediatricians' attitudes toward phytotherapy and the factors associated with them

Article Title: Pediatricians’ views and attitudes toward phytotherapy: a cross-sectional survey study

Article References: Kurt, N. C., Güven, D., Erol, C., Güzel, M., & Kurt, B. (2026). Pediatricians’ views and attitudes toward phytotherapy: a cross-sectional survey study. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-026-05551-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12906-026-05551-8

Keywords: phytotherapy, pediatrics, complementary medicine, physician attitudes, cross-sectional survey, medical education, herbal medicine, Türkiye, attitude scale, linear regression, pediatricians, survey research