Teaching residents about complementary and alternative medicine in the United States.

Abstract

Alternative medicine is one of the most visible and fastest growing areas of health care. It is well documented that patients are actively seeking and using a wide variety of alternative medicine therapies.1 At the same time, many primary care providers remain unaware of and often extremely resistant to the burgeoning information from these disciplines. The shift toward greater respect for patients' health care choices coincides with the increasing responsibility of the primary care provider to regulate referrals to subspecialists and other health care providers. Appropriate training is necessary to foster comprehensive health care of patients. In this paper, we argue that educational experiences in alternative medicine during residency training must be developed in order to improve residents' awareness and knowledge of alternative medicine and to foster cooperation and collaboration among disciplines. With the growth of complementary or alternative medicine therapies and patients' interest in them, we believe it is imperative that physicians become more familiar with these fields. We describe a complementary or alternative medicine curriculum within a general internal medicine residency program and provide brief reviews of acupuncture, chiropractic, and massage therapy.