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Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda

BACKGROUND: A substantial proportion of healthcare professionals have inadequate understanding of traditional and complementary medicine and often consider their use inappropriate. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study to understand the perceptions and attitudes of medical students, medical scho...

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Autores principales: Mwaka, Amos Deogratius, Tusabe, Gervase, Orach Garimoi, Christopher, Vohra, Sunita
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6299601/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30563506
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1419-4
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author Mwaka, Amos Deogratius
Tusabe, Gervase
Orach Garimoi, Christopher
Vohra, Sunita
author_facet Mwaka, Amos Deogratius
Tusabe, Gervase
Orach Garimoi, Christopher
Vohra, Sunita
author_sort Mwaka, Amos Deogratius
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: A substantial proportion of healthcare professionals have inadequate understanding of traditional and complementary medicine and often consider their use inappropriate. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study to understand the perceptions and attitudes of medical students, medical school faculty and traditional and complementary medicine practitioners. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. Thematic approach was used in data analysis to identify emerging themes and sub themes. Data analysis was supported with use of Atlas.ti v6.1.1. RESULTS: The majority of participants commended the inclusion of traditional and complementary medicine principles into medical school curricula. The main reasons advanced were that: patients are already using these medicines and doctors need to understand them; doctors would be more accommodating to use and not rebuke patients, thereby minimizing delays in care due to pursuit of alternative therapies; promote patient safety; foster therapeutic alliance and adherence to therapy; uphold patients' right to self-determination; lead to discovery of new drugs from traditional medicines; and set ground for regulation of practices and quality control. However, participants anticipated operational and ethical challenges that include inadequate number of faculty to teach the subject, congested curricula, increased costs in research and development to produce evidence-base data, obstruction by pharmaceutical companies, inaccessibility to and depletion of medicinal plants, and potential conflicts due to diversity in culture and values. A substantial minority of participants thought traditional medicine need not be taught in medical schools because there is lack of scientific evidence on efficacy, safety, and side effects profiles. These shortfalls could make the determination of benefits (beneficence) and harm (maleficence) difficult, as well as compromise the ability of physicians to adequately disclose benefits and harms to patients and family, thereby undermining the process of informed consent and patient autonomy. CONCLUSIONS: Training medical students in principles of traditional and complementary medicine is considered reasonable, feasible, and acceptable; and could lead to improvement in health outcomes. There are anticipated challenges to implementing a hybrid medical school curricula, but these are surmountable and need not delay introducing traditional and complementary medicine principles into medical school curricula in Uganda. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-018-1419-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-62996012018-12-20 Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda Mwaka, Amos Deogratius Tusabe, Gervase Orach Garimoi, Christopher Vohra, Sunita BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: A substantial proportion of healthcare professionals have inadequate understanding of traditional and complementary medicine and often consider their use inappropriate. METHODS: We conducted a qualitative study to understand the perceptions and attitudes of medical students, medical school faculty and traditional and complementary medicine practitioners. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. Thematic approach was used in data analysis to identify emerging themes and sub themes. Data analysis was supported with use of Atlas.ti v6.1.1. RESULTS: The majority of participants commended the inclusion of traditional and complementary medicine principles into medical school curricula. The main reasons advanced were that: patients are already using these medicines and doctors need to understand them; doctors would be more accommodating to use and not rebuke patients, thereby minimizing delays in care due to pursuit of alternative therapies; promote patient safety; foster therapeutic alliance and adherence to therapy; uphold patients' right to self-determination; lead to discovery of new drugs from traditional medicines; and set ground for regulation of practices and quality control. However, participants anticipated operational and ethical challenges that include inadequate number of faculty to teach the subject, congested curricula, increased costs in research and development to produce evidence-base data, obstruction by pharmaceutical companies, inaccessibility to and depletion of medicinal plants, and potential conflicts due to diversity in culture and values. A substantial minority of participants thought traditional medicine need not be taught in medical schools because there is lack of scientific evidence on efficacy, safety, and side effects profiles. These shortfalls could make the determination of benefits (beneficence) and harm (maleficence) difficult, as well as compromise the ability of physicians to adequately disclose benefits and harms to patients and family, thereby undermining the process of informed consent and patient autonomy. CONCLUSIONS: Training medical students in principles of traditional and complementary medicine is considered reasonable, feasible, and acceptable; and could lead to improvement in health outcomes. There are anticipated challenges to implementing a hybrid medical school curricula, but these are surmountable and need not delay introducing traditional and complementary medicine principles into medical school curricula in Uganda. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-018-1419-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2018-12-18 /pmc/articles/PMC6299601/ /pubmed/30563506 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1419-4 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Mwaka, Amos Deogratius
Tusabe, Gervase
Orach Garimoi, Christopher
Vohra, Sunita
Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
title Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
title_full Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
title_fullStr Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
title_full_unstemmed Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
title_short Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in Uganda
title_sort turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to traditional and complementary medicine practice does not make it go away: a qualitative study exploring perceptions and attitudes of stakeholders towards the integration of traditional and complementary medicine into medical school curriculum in uganda
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6299601/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30563506
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1419-4
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