Teaching complementary medicine offers a way of making teaching more holistic

Complementary and alternative medicine is no longer an obscure issue in medicine. Our patients are using alternative therapies in addition to conventional care[1 2] and sometimes do not share this information with us. But even if they did would we know how best to advise them about safety issues or about the effectiveness of a particular therapy for their problem? Surveys indicate that doctors and medical students are increasingly interested in complementary and alternative therapy,[3-5] yet lack of knowledge is one of the greatest barriers to its appropriate use. Although many medical schools and training programmes now include teaching on complementary and alternative therapies, the approaches are variable and often superficial.

In this issue Owen et al ask provocative questions about our attitudes and behaviour towards complementary and alternative therapy (p 154),[6] and point out that few of us encountered such therapy as medical students or during later training. Nevertheless, there are signs of change, and Owen et al describe initiatives to include complementary and alternative therapy in medical education in the United Kingdom. Similar changes are occurring in the United States. In 1995 a national conference on complementary and alternative therapy education involving the National Institutes of Health recommended that complementary and alternative therapy should be included in nursing and medical education. Two years later a survey of all 125 US medical schools found that 75 of them offered some form of education on complementary and alternative therapy.[7]