Course objectives are to expose medical students to other healing fields through readings, lectures and seminars, field observations, performing an independent review, and presenting a paper at the conclusion of the course.
The students are expected to evaluate the claims of various practices critically and be rigorous in their questioning of all forms of human healing including practices currently considered mainstream. The students are expected to become aware of various practices that patients may be using so that they can be better-informed physicians and be more comfortable in discussing these areas with patients whom may be interested in using them or are already doing so. The students should also learn to communicate effectively with practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine therapies.
Course Goal #1:
|Summarize the state of knowledge and data of complementary and alternative medicine therapies within an objective critical review of the literature|
|Course Goal #2:||Familiarize students with the risk, benefits and clinical applications of these particular disciplines|
|Course Goal #3:||Encourage the students to explore their attitudes and feelings about these disciplines|
|Course Goal #4:||Students should be able to explore their roles as allopathic health-care providers able to make appropriate referrals and answer patients' questions regarding CAM therapies|
|Course Goal #5:||Provide the students with firsthand exposure to the clinic practice settings of alternative providers|
|Course Goal #6:||Encourage students to communicate with all types of health-care providers who might be offering complementary and alternative medicine therapies|
This course will consist of four major components:
• Students will be required to attend all class sessions and complete all clinical assignments (65% of grade).
• Each student will be required to research, prepare and deliver an electronic (Powerpoint) presentation to the group on a healing method of their choice including the history of the field, the scientific basis for the practice, the types of patient problems that it is suited to help, the way the student might incorporate this into their future practice, and the best medical evidence (30% of grade).
• Students will be required to keep a log of their individual health balancing practice; time spent, type of practice, etc., and evaluate the benefit to them personally (5% of grade).
The syllabus will be handed out and contains articles from pertinent journals and other peer-reviewed literature to help evaluate the medical evidence base.
Required textbooks: None.