ABSTRACT
Traditional dental education focuses on providing adequate knowledge and skills to students. Dental care was delivered on the basis of this knowledge-and skills-oriented concept. Recently the relationship between dentists and patients has been emphasized, and the improvement of dental education, such as the introduction of attitude education, has been discussed. Our department has used attitude education, which creates a close human relationship between doctors and patients. One training program requires patients' participation. Understanding health creation (holistic medicine) could not be taught with traditional educational methods or without patients' participation. In this program, students interacted with patients in the classroom and came to understand the stable doctor-patient relationship, not as the idealized relationship taught by traditional dental education but as a human-human relationship founded on understanding mutual existence and reality. Consequently, the students could understand the meanings for the following questions: “What are characteristics of a stable relationship?” and “How should health be created?”. In this paper, the contents and the methods of our programs are introduced and the students' evaluation is discussed.