RAND Health Abstract

A Comparative Study of Chiropractic and Medical Education.

Coulter I, Adams A, Coggan P, Wilkes M, Gonyea M. Alternative Therapies of Health Medicine, Vol. 4, No. 5, 1998, pp. 64-75

Represents one of the first efforts to compare chiropractic and medical education. It is done with the belief that, if physicians are going to refer patients to chiropractors, they should understand something of the training of chiropractors. This article describes and compares that training with the training of physicians in medical school; however, it does not rate the quality of that education, a subject for further study. This is an important article, because chiropractic is the largest of the alternative, complementary health professions in the United States and chiropractors do about 80% of all manipulations of the spine in the United States. It is believed that the medical profession’s lack of information about the education of chiropractors precludes extensive referrals and integration between the two professions, even when historical and political barriers can be overcome. The study is a descriptive comparison of the curriculum of North American chiropractic and medical colleges, supplemented by in-depth data obtained through site visits of six institutions: three medical and three chiropractic.

The general conclusion is that there was substantial commonality between chiropractic and medical programs in the basic sciences and the teaching of the basic sciences. The programs are more similar than dissimilar both in types of subjects offered and in time allocated to each subject. The programs also share some common areas in the clinical sciences. Chiropractic and allopathic medicine differ the most in clinical practice, which in medical school far exceeds that in chiropractic school. The therapies that chiropractic and medical students learn are distinct from one another and the settings in which students receive clinical training are different and isolated from one another.

Considering both the similarities and dissimilarities between the two curricula, it is suggested that further work be done to examine the quality of the two educational programs in more detail.