Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2011, Article ID 728902, 5 pages doi:10.1093/ecam/nen075 Original Article The Knowledge, Attitudes and Usage of Complementary and Alternative Medicine of Medical Students Dawn DeSylvia,1 Margaret Stuber,1 Cha Chi Fung,1 Shahrzad Bazargan-Hejazi,2 and Edwin Cooper1 1 David Geﬀen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1759, USA 2 Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, CA, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Margaret Stuber, mstuber@mednet.ucla.edu Received 8 August 2008; Revised 3 October 2008; Accepted 22 October 2008 Copyright © 2011 Dawn DeSylvia et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The increasing use of CAM by patients has led to an increase in teaching about CAM in medical school in the US. In preparation for initiation of a new curriculum in Integrative Medicine at the David Geﬀen School of Medicine at UCLA a cross sectional survey was used to assess medical students’: (i) familiarity, (ii) opinions, (iii) personal use and (iv) willingness to recommend speciﬁc CAM modalities, using a ﬁve point Likert scale of an established measure. A total of 263 ﬁrst, second and third year medical students at UCLA completed surveys. Third year students reported less personal use of CAM and less favorable attitudes towards CAM than ﬁrst year students. Since this was a cross-sectional rather than longitudinal study this may be a cohort eﬀect. However, it may reﬂect the increased curricular emphasis on evidenced-based medicine, and subsequent student dependence on randomized clinical trials to inﬂuence and guide practice. This will need to be addressed in curricular eﬀorts to incorporate Integrative Medicine. Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) has become a $42 billion dollar industry, with 30–50% of Americans utilizing some form of CAM for their healthcare [1]. There is rapidly growing literature about the use of CAM in a variety of medical situations including chronic pain [2], cancer survivors [3], functional bowel disorders [4], stroke [5] and depression [6]. Much of the focus in medical education is on the teaching of Integrative Medicine, which makes use of both conventional and com- plementary/alternative approaches. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health has made recommendations regarding the teaching of Integrative Medicine in medical schools [1, 7, 8]. Speciﬁc recommendations have recently been published regarding the content and approaches to such education [9– 13]. Medical schools across the United States [14–17] in the United Kingdom [18] and in Israel [19] have done recent needs assessment, indicating an enthusiasm among students for teaching of these topics. In preparation for such teaching, the medical com- munity around the world is beginning to examine the relationship between medical training and the attitudes of medical students towards Integrative Medicine and CAM. A Canadian study in 2000 found that medical students were less knowledgeable about CAM than students in other medical disciplines [20]. A study of ﬁve diﬀerent medical training programs in 2004-2005 in the United States found that students at allopathic medical schools in the mid- western US were less positive about complementary and alternative modes of treatment than those from allopathic schools in the northwestern US [21]. A paper in 2003 from the United Kingdom suggested that attitudes towards CAM approaches tended to become more negative over the ﬁrst 3 years of medical school [22]. However, it appears that entering medical students in the United Kingdom may have had a limited exposure to CAM modalities. A more recent longitudinal study in California found that the attitudes of medical students tended to remain relatively consistent over the years of medical training [23]. The David Geﬀen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles has been reﬁning the integrative medicine aspect of the medical school curriculum. Based on the studies described above, it appears that measurement of the eﬀectiveness of any such curricular change requires measurement of attitudes as well as knowledge. This study was conducted to establish a baseline of familiarity, attitudes