Course Concept and Description / Objectives

Complimentary and alternative (C & A) practices, including those which form the core of “behavioral medicine” are rapidly finding acceptance within the clinical community. Simultaneously, “accepted” practices are falling from favor as they are shown to be ineffective or even counterproductive. Patients now visit as many or more “alternative” providers as traditional providers and are spending billions of dollars on attempts to get care not available from the traditional medical community. This course is intended to acquaint you with many of those practices which may become the new standard of care in the near future. It is also intended to help you learn to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the claims made by the proponents of these practices so you can more readily separate the real knowledge from the emotional advertising.

Objectives/Outcome Measures:  By the end  of this course, students will:

1. Be able to list and explain the basic mechanisms and principles of CAM and its most common techniques.
2. Be able to write essays accurately describing a balanced overview of a selection of complementary and alternative medicine interventions recently and currently practiced in the “West”.
3. Be able to explain in essay format the underlying psychophysiological mechanisms through which non-specific interventions are likely to produce very real effects.
4. Be able to demonstrate through description of experimental designs techniques for objectively assessing the validity of claims presented in formats different than usually acceptable to current “Western” science.
5. Be able to demonstrate the ability to assess the strength of evidence supporting a variety of common CAM interventions within the student’s scope of practice through literature searches so the student can decide whether to get additional training to incorporate these techniques into practice.

Texts:

Required:

Mosby’s Complementary & Alternative Medicine: A Research-Based Approach; 3rd edition. By Lyn W. Freeman. Published by Mosby of St. Louis Mo. In 2008. ISBN 978-0-323-05346-4.

Optional:

Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Rehabilitation Edited by Eric Leskowitz, Published by Elsevier (Churchill Livingston) of Edinburgh and New York. 2003, ISBN 0-443-06599-3.

Format (How we are going to proceed through the course):

This home study course is divided into 28 units. Each unit consists of one of more chapters of reading in the texts, sometimes an audiovisual lecture, review questions to be answered, and an e-mail or phone based discussion with me. The course begins with an introductory audiovisual lecture profusely illustrated by power-point slides.

When you sign up for the course, you will be given immediate access to the course web site. After doing the reading for each unit (and attending the audiovisual lecture when provided), you will answer a brief series of essay questions about each topic, e-mail your answers to me, and then we will interact by e-mail or phone about each topic. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions and for me to fill in gray areas and provide additional information on topics of special interest to you.

Contacting me:

The best way to contact me i
s via e-mail at rsherman@nwinet.com. I check my e-mail several times per day, Sunday – Friday unless I am away at a meeting, etc. If I am going to be unavailable for a few days while you are taking this course, I will let you know.

Format:

Home study supported by e-mail chats after each unit is completed. The lecture portion of the course is presented through a series of audiovisual lectures profusely illustrated by power-point slides and movies. The course is accessed from the course web site. The audiovisual lectures are on power point slides. You will hear the instructor’s voice while viewing the power point sides. The lectures are between 1 ½ and 2 ½ hours in length. Reading assignments parallel the lectures. After watching the lecture and reading the assigned supporting files, you will answer a brief series of short essay review questions (which are in the review questions file on the course web site). The answered questions are then e-mailed to the instructor. You and the instructor will discuss each unit via e-mail chat after your answers are assessed. There is no need to complete the discussion with the instructor before proceeding to the succeeding lecture & chapters. It is expected that all review questions will be answered correctly and completely by the student. Any questions answered incorrectly or incompletely must be discussed and/or corrected. You will have at least one real-time meeting with the instructor via a web based program such as “go to meeting” during which you will interact around your new skills.

Accessibility: Hearing impaired people can view the slides only as virtually all of the material presented in the lectures is typed onto the slides. Visually impaired people can concentrate on the verbal lectures as the slide material is repeated in the lecture accompanying each slide.

Accessing course materials:

Course materials will be sent to your email address through either “transfer large files” or “Dropbox” after your payment for the course is processed. This may take several days. No CDs are sent to you.

Computer and Computer Knowledge Requirements:

Anybody with a modern computer and a bit of basic understanding of computer operation (at the level of being able to send e-mails) can play this course with minimal problems. You must have a computer (a) capable of connecting to the internet and running a typical internet program, (b) containing/running a modern word processor such as Microsoft word or Word Perfect, (c) the capability to play sounds such as music (has speakers and appropriate software which normally come with any modern computer), and (d) a slide viewing program such as Power Point (you can probably get a slide viewing program free off the internet if you don’t have one). Any modern (e.g., built within the last ten years), IBM style computer running Windows 98 and more recent platforms (e.g., XP or Windows 8) should be able to do this. Speed, hard disk size, and RAM are not factors for computers in the above category.

Dozens of students have used recent Apple products (MACs etc.) for the course however they frequently have more difficulty playing the course materials than PC users do.

If you are using a MAC type of computer, you must have a current version of “quicktime”. If you do not have it, you can download it for free from the web.

You will also need to be able to use the National Library of Medicine’s medical literature sites (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) so you can locate citations (and frequently abstracts) for material you will need for your papers. You will also need to be able to access the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s web site (http://nccam.nih.gov/) so you can search for consensus statements about C & A techniques.

Topic Outline / Reading & Listening Assignments:

1. Introduction – How medical practice changes – the history of C & A practices Audiovisual lecture 1; MS word text file “concepts of disease” (NOTE, this file is a crucial part of the course introduction.)
2. Evaluating credibility of claims for efficacy of C & A products and practices Audiovisual lecture 2; Text file “CAM group size”
3. Potential indirect mechanisms Freeman chapters 1 – 4; Audiovisual lectures 4-6; Text file
4. Relaxation Freeman chapter 5; Audiovisual lecture 9
5. Meditation Freeman chapter 6
6. Hypnotherapy Freeman chapter 8
7. Imagery Freeman chapter 9
8. Chiropractic Freeman chapter 10
9. Acupuncture & Traditional Chinese Medicine Freeman chapter 11
10. Homeopathy Freeman chapter 12
11. Massage Therapy Freeman chapter 13
12. Aroma Therapy Freeman chapter 14
13. Herbal Therapy Audiovisual lecture 5; Freeman chapter 15; Read text file “Ginkgo doesn’t work”
14. Exercise Freeman chapter 16
15. Spiritual Medicine Freeman chapter 17
16. Therapeutic Touch Freeman chapter 18; text file entitled “healing touch”
17. Trigger Points Audiovisual lecture 6
18. Reiki Freeman chapter 19
19. Biofields Freeman chapter 20; Audiovisual lecture 4
20. Behavioral medicine Audiovisual lectures 7 – 9; Freeman chapter 7
21. Ethics of providing CAM Audiovisual lecture 10
22. Future of CAM Freeman chapter 21

When all requirements have been successfully completed, your course completion certificate will be e-mailed to you and BCIA will be informed that you completed the course.

Schedule:

There is one year to complete the course. Just contact us at admin@behavmedfoundation.org or 800 530 6658 to get started.

Duration of course validity:

There is one year to complete the course.  Courses not completed by that time are void and must be repurchased if still available. No refunds are provided for courses not completed within one year of purchase.

CE Credit:

These are continuing education, not university accredited, courses. The Behavioral Medicine R&T Foundation is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Behavioral Medicine R&T Foundation maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

BCIA:

This course is accepted by the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance for recertification continuing education.

Payment, Refund, Scholarship, and cancellation policies:  

Full payment for each course is required before access to the course is provided. Payment is by credit card though our web site’s secure ordering section or by check in US dollars made out to the Foundation and sent to the address below. Full refund will be made until students are given access to the course materials. After getting access to the course materials there is no refund at all as the Foundation has committed its resources to you and you have access to all of the course materials. A course would only be cancelled due to an extreme emergency on the part of the course instructor or the Foundation. In the highly unlikely event a course is cancelled, you would receive a full refund.

Scholarships: 

The Foundation gives scholarships consisting of 25% off the cost of the course(s) to (a) students and professionals (e.g. clinicians, coaches, teachers) from emerging nations and (b) full time graduate students in developed nations.

Course updates:

Updates to all courses are placed on the course web site as they are made. Students are informed when updates are available. 

Questions / further information?

Contact Dr. Richard Sherman (director of the psychophysiology CE and doctoral programs) at admin@behavmedfoundation.org or 1.800.530.6658.

Administrative Information

Conflict of Interest: Neither the Behavioral Medicine Research & Training Foundation, its staff, nor the course instructor have any conflict of interest involving materials presented in this course.

Student comments about the courses and instructors:

Students who wish to comment about the courses and instructors other than through the “end of course” evaluations may wish to use the Foundation’s account at the anonymous comment submission site Incogneato (www.incognea.to). When a student submits a comment to our account (https://ansr.me/VWv70) on the site, there is no way for us to know who sent the comment unless the student provides an email. Students are always welcome to submit comments to this site. We take them very seriously.

Students who wish to make a formal complaint about a course or instructor can do so by following the Foundation’s grievance process which is detailed in the document by that name. Students can request the document from the program’s administrator by emailing admin@behavmedfourndation.org.