The curriculum at UT Southwestern Medical School is built upon a foundation of two years of classroom and laboratory sciences followed by two years of clinical clerkships in acute care and ambulatory care settings. Recent revisions have focused on integrating coursework both vertically through the four years and horizontally among concurrent courses.
Nutrition represents one of the threads of content being woven throughout the four years.
The first two years of the curriculum include traditional lectures, as well as small group learning sessions. Psychiatry, Clinical Ethics in Medicine, Clinical Medicine, Pathology, Anatomy, Cell Biology, Medical Microbiology and Medical Neuroscience all utilize small group learning. Students learn basic concepts of nutrition in the biochemistry and pathology courses with lectures on genes and obesity, fat and water-soluble vitamins, and malnutrition. Popular diet book approaches to weight loss are assessed as students integrate principles of metabolism at the close of the biochemistry course. The development of a Web Curriculum currently provides first and second year students with extensive materials supplemental to lectures, including test questions for self-assessment.