Teaching psychological medicine to family practice residents

Abstract

The authors describe the development of a curriculum focused on teaching residents in family practice how to recognize and deal with the psychological issues presented by patients and by their own reactions to patients. They describe how teachers in a medical school's divisions of family practice and psychosomatic and liaison psychiatry collaborated to develop an integrated training program and the changes this program effected in the attitudes and understanding of residents. They found that residents in this program shifted their emphasis from a narrow view of traditional medical diagnosis and treatment to a broader psycholgical-biological understanding of patients.