A Survey on the Awareness of Students in a National Registered Dietitian Training Program about Kampo Medicine / 日本東洋医学雑誌

ABSTRACT

Background and objective: Diet has been recognized as an important part of Kampo medicine, and various plants with which we often cook are included as components of many Kampo formulations. Accordingly, nutritional science is closely related to Kampo medicine. So there is a need for national registered dietitian and nutritional science students to learn Kampo medicine. Despite this, no survey has reported on the awareness of nutritional science students toward Kampo medicine in Japan. We conducted for the first time a survey on this awareness amongst nutritional science students about Kampo medicine.Methods: A 13-item anonymous questionnaire was distributed to the third-year students in a national registered dietitian training program in Japan.Results: We obtained answers from 509 students in 9 institutions. Of the respondents, 59.3% answered that they were interested in Kampo medicine, and 86.4% of the students who were not interested in Kampo medicine answered that the reason was they had no chance to learn it. However, 81.3% of the students answered that they would attend lectures on Kampo medicine if it was adopted as part of their curriculum.Conclusions: These results suggest that Kampo medicine should be included in educational programs for nutritional science students.