• Education
• Outreach
• Research
• Patient Care
• People

Curriculum Overview

There will be four curricular components of the T32 training program for predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows:

(a) 12 semester units of CAM coursework covering conceptual, methodology content, and professional skill development topics (1 3-unit course/semester for 4 semesters);

(b) 2 semester units of Bioethics (COPH 651) taught by the Director of the Human Subjects Protection Program;

(c) 9 semester units of clinical research practicum to develop, implement, and complete a research project relevant to the trainee's interests (one 2 or 3-unit semester unit experience for 4 semesters);

(d) 6 hours/week of mentor-guided study and research experience during year 01 (FCM 900 or cross-registered course in their home departments if pre-doc) in which the fellow will be engaged in ongoing research at UA under the direction of the core faculty mentor;

(e) participation in the monthly DFCM journal club, with trainee presentation at least once each year

(f) enrollment in other established courses across the U Arizona/Arizona Health Sciences Center campuses and the PIM online Fellowship in Integrative Medicine to meet the fellow's individual learning needs.

Note: Each credit hour is interpreted in the Graduate College at the doctoral or post-doctoral level to be 1 contact hour for seminars, discussions or lectures OR 2 contact hours of research or clinical practicum. Therefore, fellows in the T-32 program would be minimally enrolled in 6-9 and up to 12 credits each semester and have a minimal total contact time of 10 hours/week in Year 1 (not counting the research experience time) and 9 hours/week in Year 2. If requested with appropriate staff privileging and malpractice insurance arrangements, MD and DO trainees may elect to spend a maximum of a ½ day/week seeing patients, to the extent these responsibilities do not interfere with research training activities. Any ACAMRTP trainee may elect to attend, whenever feasible, the half-day weekly PIM interdisciplinary integrative medicine patient care conference to learn about a consultative clinical model for integrative health care as a setting for outcomes research.

(a) CAM coursework. Required for post-doctoral fellows; strongly encouraged for predoctoral fellows, as possible within degree-related required coursework conflicts. A 4-course sequence over 2 years is proposed for this revised fellowship.

This coursework sequence will introduce fellows to prevailing philosophies of science, challenge their theoretical thinking about CAM and whole systems interventions and research strategies and develop their understanding of the state of the science in CAM/IM and whole systems research (Semester 1); strengthen their research skills in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies useful in CAM/IM and whole systems research (Semester 2); develop and hone grantsmanship skills and knowledge, including creation of a program of research in CAM/IM and whole systems, varied funding sources, the process of identifying researchable and fundable questions, grants writing and creation of a research protocol for quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods proposals, budgeting and the grants review/funding processes (Semester 3); and prepare the fellows for their research career by developing skills and knowledge about the implementation of research protocols, grant/project management, supervision and oversight of research staff and mentees, reporting processes and responsibilities of PIs, dissemination of research findings and professional role (Semester 4).

Thus, this course sequence focuses on the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to become a successful researcher with an active program of research with the CAM/IM and whole systems research environment. These courses will facilitate the development of Fellows' own mentored and independent research projects that will occur during the parallel project practicum seminar series and experience.

Overall format: The four CAM courses to be offered will be housed in DFCM as upper division graduate level courses. The two courses previously approved by the College of Public Health and the University of Arizona's Graduate College in 2002 and taught over the course of the previous T-32 (five years) will be modified officially and moved from COPH to DFCM. Based on evaluation of these courses over that time period as well as evaluation of the current T-32 program, course revisions will be submitted through the formal UA curriculum approval processes upon renewal of this training grant in 2007. The two additional courses will be proposed and routed through the curriculum approval processes within the Department of FCM, the College of Medicine, and the University of Arizona's Graduate College.

These four courses will be offered during either fall or spring semester and will be repeated annually for newly admitted fellows. Courses at the University of Arizona occur over a 15-week period that commences in either August or January and ends in December or May. Therefore, these four courses will result in 45 contact hours of learning each semester.