Teaching Drug Interactions to Complementary and Alternative Medicine Students

A drug interaction occurs when a patient's response to a drug is modified by food, nutritional supplements, formulation excipients, environmental factors, other drugs, or disease. An interaction can either increase or decrease the effectiveness and/or the side effects of a drug, or it can create a new side effect not seen before. Interactions between drugs (drug-drug interactions) are the commonest and may be either beneficial or harmful. Drug interactions are avoidable and knowing how drug interactions occur, recognizing them when they occur, and knowing how to manage them is an important part of clinical practice. The main objective of learning pharmacology and drug interactions by the CAM students is the integration between the two systems of medicine and as far as the use of medicines are concerned, knowledge of pharmacology and its basic principles are most essential in understanding the adverse reactions and drug interactions that can hamper the integrating of the two systems of medicine as such outcomes will produce doubts and lack of confidence in the end-users.

Assessing knowledge of herbal medicine course for dental students

BACKGROUND

The aims of this article are to assess dental students' knowledge about herbal medicine usage and the potential benefits and side effects, and to conduct a short course about herbal medicine.

METHODS

All fourth-year pre-doctoral students were invited to participate in a herbal medicine course as a test while the sixth-year students were the control group. A survey was tested for validity and reliability. It comprised of 16 multiple choice questions was given before the course and one month after the course. The sum score of knowledge for each participant was calcuated based on the ability to identify the use of herbs in dentistry with high-quality evidence (correct answer) or total answer for periodontal disease and caries.

RESULTS

The response rate for completing the study was 112 fourth-year students (73.7%) and 64 sixth-year students (39.0%). More than half of the participants (52.5%) were unsure about the importance of herbal medicine in dentistry. However, the majority also stated that the most common herbs used in dentistry were clove (62.9%), followed by curcuma turmeric (54.7%) and meswak (43.0%). The fourth-year students displayed evidence of a higher overall knowledge score after the course in herbal medicine related to periodontal disease in total and correct answers (mean 4.48 ± 4.13, 3.73 ± 3.31, respectively) compared to before the course (mean 0.84 ± 1.23, 0.74 ± 1.16, respectively) (p-value < 0.001). The post-course periodontal disease total and correct answers were statistically significant between fourth- and sixth-year students.

CONCLUSION

Herbal medicine has a potential positive impact on dentistry. However, these effects are not fully investigated and received full attention in academic institute. This short educational program related to medicinal herbs can improve the knowledge of dental students. This will help increase the awareness about the use and potential side effects of herbal medicine in the dental field.

Education of Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis by automatic tongue diagnosis system

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the efficacy of applying automatic tongue diagnosis system (ATDS) to the training of novice Chinese medicine (CM) doctors in the tongue diagnosis.

METHOD

A two-round experiment composed of pre- and after-training tests was performed. Two groups of CM doctors were formed by experienced doctors (ED) and novice doctors (ND). The intra- and inter-observer agreements for the ED and ND groups, and the inter-observer agreements between ATDS and ED, and ATDS and ND were derived first. After a 1-month training of the ND, the intra- and inter-observer agreements of the ND group, and the inter-observer agreement between ATDS and ND were obtained.

RESULT

The kappa value of agreement data for ND after training was significantly higher than ND before training with a level of P<0.05, indicating an obvious improvement of intra-observer agreement for ND after training with ATDS. The inter-observer agreements for the ED group, and ND group after training were significantly higher (P<0.05) than the ND group before training. In contrast, no significance is observed between the ED group and the ND group after training, indicating that physicians in the ND group achieve an inter-observer agreement to the same level as that of ED after 1-month training.

CONCLUSION

This finding validates the utilization of ATDS as a mean of education in forging consensus during the learning process of tongue diagnosis.