4th Year Medical Student Curriculum

060.1 Pediatric Cultural Competence and Complementary/Alternative Medicine

Instructor: Linda Barnes, Ph.D, MA, MTS
Location: Boston Medical Center, MAT 4, 91 E. Concord St.
Telephone: 617-414-4534
E-mail: linda.barnes@bmc.org

Number of Students: Up to three per block
Period to be Offered: Blocks 15-20: one month

The purpose of this elective will be to gain an understanding of key issues in practicing culturally competent medicine and its relationship with cross-cultural approaches to complementary/alternative therapies.

Structured activities will include a weekly literature seminar, a discussion of teaching cases, and meetings with traditional healers in local communities. These meetings will give students the opportunity to discuss culturally-based understandings of illness and healing, and their interface with biomedicine. Students will also be taken on site visits to different traditional healing centers, including local herbal medicine sites.

Students will learn to complete a mini-ethnography, and to apply this core medical-anthropology skill to clinical interviewing and patient history-taking. They will observe clinicians at work, focusing on the cross-cultural dimensions of the patient-doctor interaction. Through mentored discussions with the instructor, they will learn to identify issues in these interactions that are related to culturally competent practice, and to locate resources that will help them better understand such issues.

It is expected that students will write a research paper drawing on their experiences, with the topic to be developed in consultation with the instructor. They will present this material for discussion in a final group meeting that will also include some of the Pediatrics faculty.

http://www.bumc.bu.edu/ - course description