Evaluation of Kampo education with a focus on the selected core concepts.

OBJECTIVE: Japanese medical schools currently only offer students traditional Japanese Kampo medicine education for an extremely limited amount of time. The purpose of this study was to discover how to generate interest in and motivate learning Kampo medicine. METHODS: Kampo medical sessions, including a lecture series, written examinations, and small-group (12-14 students) EBL (experience-based learning) sessions, were provided for 4th-year medical students (N=117) at Tokai University School of Medicine. Students were taught about "qi, blood, and fluid" and the "deficiency-excess pattern," the two most important core concepts of Kampo medicine and connecting them to clinical application. We evaluated the teaching methods based on questionnaires and written examinations before and after the training course. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare changes in awareness before and after the lectures and the Mann-Whitney U test to examine the relationship between the students' interest in Kampo medicine and their examination scores. RESULTS: This training method improved students' general understanding of Kampo medicine and increased their interest and motivation to study Kampo medicine. CONCLUSION: Considering the current status of Kampo education, this training method is effective to educate students in the basic concepts of Kampo medicine.

Evaluation of medical students using the "qi, blood, and fluid" system of Kampo medicine.

OBJECTIVE: Although "qi, blood, and fluid" (QBF) is the most important concept for patients in Kampo medicine, there are few studies about the conditions of the QBF system among healthy populations. We used QBF pattern scores to determine whether or not medical students, presumed to be healthy, had any potentially pathological conditions. METHODS: Six consecutive fourth-year classes totaling 652 medical students evaluated their own QBF conditions using Terasawa's QBF pattern scores. The six conditions: "qi deficiency" (QD), "qi stagnation" (QS), "qi counterflow" (QC), "blood deficiency" (BD), "blood stasis" (BS), and "fluid disturbance" (FD), were categorized according to Terasawa's criteria. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the score differences between the genders, Chi-square test was used to examine gender differences in the QBF diagnoses, and the Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient analysis was used to analyze the correlation between each category of QBF. RESULTS: In all, 44.6% of the students met at least one diagnostic criterion in the QBF system. QC, BD, BS, and FD were established more in females, and QD and QS were established without gender differences. CONCLUSIONS: Most students who were presumed to be healthy were revealed to have some potentially pathological conditions using the QBF system.