International Journal of Collaborative Research on Internal Medicine & Public Health

American Medical Students' Beliefs in the Effectiveness of Alternative Medicine

Introduction: While the use of complementary and alternative medical therapy (CAM) is common in the U.S., there have been no prior national studies of CAMrelated attitudes of U.S. medical students.

Methods: We surveyed the Class of 2003 at freshman orientation, entrance to wards, and senior year in a nationally representative sample of 16 U.S. medical schools. Our primary outcome of interest was students’ Likert-scaled responses to the statement “Alternative medicine can often be as effective as traditional medicine.”

Results: With 4764 responses overall (a response rate of 80.3%), 9% strongly agreed, 45% agreed, 34% neither agreed nor disagreed, 11% disagreed, and 2% strongly disagreed that alternative medicine could be as effective as traditional medicine. Students became modestly more polarized in their beliefs, moving from 37% of students neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the statement at freshman year to 31% at senior year. Several variables including gender, paternal educational level, ethnicity, religion, political self-characterization, intended specialty, and preventionorientation were associated with agreement.

Conclusions: U.S. patients commonly use CAM, but newly-minted U.S. physicians’ are often skeptical about its efficacy. This disconnect may make it difficult to integrate patients’ CAM use into clinical decision-making.

Author(s): Erica Frank, Neda Ratanawongsa, Jennifer Carrera

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