Responding to Patients' Questions About Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine

Abstract This resource features a collection of activities, including an independent exercise and small-group session, developed to help first- and second-year medical students explore the issues that arise when communicating with patients regarding integrative medicine or complementary and alternative medicine use. These activities are designed to prepare students for situations in which they need to have discussions with patients regarding healing modalities about which most physicians have little or no information. They are also meant to give students tools to help them communicate with patients about different health beliefs and health care models in a way that promotes a stronger doctor-patient relationship. Likewise, they are intended to teach students how to evaluate the quality of, and synthesize information from, a variety of sources to answer patient questions about integrative medicine or complementary and alternative medicine use. This resource was created and first taught in 2002 and has been updated annually to reflect evolving research in integrative medicine. The linked exercise was designed to enrich both independent and interactive components of the required curriculum in integrative medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). This portion of the curriculum is presented in the Mechanisms, Methods and Malignancies course of the second preclinical year. Together with a 2-hour overview lecture on the history, prevalence, and use of complementary and alternative medicine, this content forms the foundation of UCSF's undergraduate medical education instruction in integrative medicine and reinforces the social/behavioral sciences and epidemiology/evidence-based medicine curricular themes.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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