Med Students’ CAM Training Limited

Massage has been shown to lessen hospital patients’ pain and stress—but tomorrow’s doctors won’t necessarily know that, according to a new report on medical-school students’ training in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

The report, called “Preserving Your Right to Choose,” was prepared by the Texas Health Freedom Coalition, an organization of Texas grassroots citizens, professionals, and natural products manufacturing and retail groups. The report examined the publicly available information on the curriculums of the top 25 U.S. medical schools, as rated by the annual U.S. News and World Report survey. The list includes leading medical schools, such as Harvard University, The University of California-San Francisco and The University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Dallas.

The schools mandate very little training in CAM, the report states.

“Virtually all these schools offer optional expanded training in the areas of complementary care and nutrition. But 92 percent of the schools offer so little mandatory complementary care education to new physicians that their publicly advertised curriculums don’t even mention any courses in these areas,” said Peter McCarthy, a spokesman for the coalition. In contrast, he added, the bulk of medical education at these schools focuses on treatment of illness with pharmaceutical drugs and surgery.