Few today would argue against the fact that health professionals must be knowledgeable about CAM in order to best serve the interests of their patients. The difficulty comes in attempting to decide what should be taught and how to fit such teachings into already crowded health professional educational curricula. The next section explores ideas about what should be taught about CAM to conventional medical practitioners.

The incorporation of CAM training into the curriculum of health professional education is not consistent, nor do guidelines exist on what content might be appropriate in such education. Grollman (2001) asserts that education about CAM should be evidence based and should not include teaching of unproven therapies. Even though evidence of effectiveness exists for some CAM therapies (see Chapter 5), most CAM therapies have only fairly recently been subjected to Western methods of scientific inquiry. As discussed elsewhere in this report, however, it is also the case that the effectiveness of many conventional medical therapies taught in medical school have also not been validated through randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Ezzo et al. (2001) found that only 40 percent of conventional medicine that had been tested by RCTs had positive or possibly positive effects.

Chapter 3 discusses the kinds of evidence that various decision makers use to make decisions. Researchers, for example, rely most heavily on studies with strong research designs, plausible biological mechanisms, the consistency of findings from study to study, and dose-response relationships. Although individuals who train new conventional practitioners require evidence of treatment effectiveness to decide how to train students, they also draw heavily on their own experience in deciding which treatments are effective and which ones are not. This is consistent with the recommendations in the IOM report on health professions education (IOM, 2003). That report took the position that education should “integrate best research with clinical expertise and patient values for optimum care, and participate in learning and research activities to the extent feasible.” Therefore, if the decision about what to teach is not based solely on the results of RCTs, on what other basis might one decide what should be taught about CAM?

The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (2002) recommended, “The education and training of CAM and conventional practitioners should be designed to ensure public safety, improve health, and increase the availability of qualified and knowledgeable CAM and conventional practitioners and enhance the collaboration among them.”