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Article History

Received: 19 November 2025

Accepted: 10 March 2026

First Online: 9 May 2026

Declarations

:

: ELL has received a bursary from the University of Maryland School of Medicine/Cochrane Complementary Medicine Field for working on a Cochrane Systematic Review and was a doctoral candidate studying the prevalence of use of TCAM and conventional medicines in New Zealand; part of this work is funded by a Health Research Council grant (2020–2022) for which J Barnes is the principal investigator. FO, JN and SSY have no conflicts of interest to declare with regards to this work. JH was a co-investigator for a Health Research Council grant that explored prevalence of use of TCAM and conventional medicines in New Zealand. In the last 3 years, JB has received: royalties from Elsevier and SpringerNature in respect of authorship of reference texts on herbal medicines; travel expenses and/or conference expenses from United States Pharmacopeia, UK Drug Safety Research Unit, University of Mississippi, Southern Cross University, International Society of Pharmacovigilance, and South African Botanical Products Association in respect of invited meetings/conference presentations; non-financial support (clinical trial supplies) from Achieve Life Sciences and NZVAPOR (both 2022–24) as a co-investigator. JB is an Editorial Board member of Drug Safety . JB was not involved in the selection of peer reviewers for the manuscript nor any of the subsequent editorial decisions.

: The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available as the researchers do not have the permissions from the participants or from a research ethics committee to share the data.

: Not applicable

: The questionnaire testing study was approved by the Auckland Health Research Ethics Committee on 23/09/2021 for three years. Reference Number AH2323.

: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

: Not applicable.

: All authors contributed to the idea for the article. ELL drafted the article, and JB and JH critically revised the work. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.