East Meets West in Evidence-Based Medicine Program

As an increasing number of patients venture to combine western medical treatment with alternative modalities, researchers in complementary and alternative medicine endeavor to adopt the western medical standard of “evidence-based medicine.” An ambitious synthesis of this meeting of medical traditions may be found in the Tufts EBCAM website, pictured at right. The web site “was created by Tufts University School of Medicine in partnership with the New England School of Acupuncture to support the development of an evidence-based medicine (EBM) curriculum. The curriculum is designed to teach medical students EBM skills that can be applied to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and to allopathic medicine.” Nutrition/Infection Unit professor Margo Woods, D.Sc., is a co-investigator on the EBCAM project.

NAA - Nutrition Program at Tufts University School of Medicine

In Year One, Tufts University School of Medicine has a 27-hour required course, Nutrition and Medicine, which has been given since 1991. In Year Two, Principles of Clinical Medicine gives students an opportunity to conduct nutrition evaluations of nursing home patients. In addition, nutrition assessment is integrated into the Interviewing (Year One) and Physical Diagnosis (Year Two) courses.

The Nutrition Academic Award (1998-2003; NIH HL-97-011) from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), has given Tufts the opportunity to expand nutrition education to students in their clinical years (Year Three), as well as to Residents practicing at Tufts University School of Medicine teaching hospitals. The primary focus is to teach nutrition principles and clinical practice skills for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and those diseases that impact a patient's risk of cardiovascular disease (hypertension, obesity, diabetes). Our goal is to continue to develop nutrition education materials, training, and resources to enable current and future physicians to integrate nutrition into their clinical practices for prevention and treatment of disease.

Twenty-one medical schools across the country are currently receiving Nutrition Academic Awards. You can access any of these schools' NAA programs through the National NAA website. In addition, NAA committees have developed nutrition resources and have recommended an extensive list of websites on nutrition, cardiovascular disease, and health.

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