The Application of an Educational Program Designed to Change Young Peoples Attitudes about Acupuncture Therapy and Receiving Acupuncture Treatment / 全日本鍼灸学会雑誌

ABSTRACT

We have developed a new educational program directed at young people who have never undergone acupuncture therapy. The objective of this program is to provide them with useful information related to acupuncture therapy. We examined whether this program had managed to motivate participants to receive therapy and whether or not it had caused a change in their attitude toward it. Forty-four young people participated in the program. We divided them into two main groups; one whose members knew someone close to them who had received acupuncture therapy, and one whose members did not, in consideration of the images that each might have of therapy. In addition, some members of these were selected at random of receive visual aids, making a total of four groups. In order to investigate the efficacy of the program with regard to each group, we compared the average of each evaluation at before and after the program. All groups showed an increase in scores in all criteria after the implementation of the program. These results indicate that the educational program used in this study was effective.