Introduction:

Undergraduate medical curricula are overloaded with content, making the need to optimize essential skills and knowledge paramount. The National Curricular Guidelines for the medical course (DCNs) put focus on patient treatment, which involves several interfaces with homeopathy. However, despite it being recognized as a medical specialty in Brazil since 1980, homeopathy is rarely present in undergraduate medical education.

Objective:

To develop a collection of essential skills and knowledge for teaching homeopathy as part of the undergraduate medical curriculum.

Methods:

Quanti-qualitative study performed using the standard Delphi technique in two rounds with specialized homeopathy teachers from Brazil. An anonymous online questionnaire was conducted to identify the learning competences needed in homeopathy for undergraduate medical students. Following content analysis, the themes and sub-themes were grouped into the two main categories of knowledge and skills, which were returned to the specialists who rated their importance for each item using the “Four-Point Likert Scale” from not at all important to very important. For the purpose of generating a general consensus, two criteria were adopted: the “De Loe index” and a importance score.

Results:

There was a high degree of consensus regarding eleven of the fourteen themes/sub-themes, five of which were considered essential, with an importance score above 9.0 (three related to the general theme, Homeopathic Clinic, one to Homeopathic Theory and Method and another to Homeopathic Research). There was also a high level of consensus regarding eight of the eleven skills, but only two gained a score of above 9.0, both related to Homeopathic Clinic.

Conclusion:

The teaching of Homeopathy can contribute to a paradigmatic change in medicine, particularly in the sense of prioritizing the patient and promoting health, as well as allowing for a more humanized and patient-centered medical engagement. These factors would justify the adoption of its teaching, so much so it could be made mandatory across all medical study. The establishment of a “competency matrix” for homeopathy study, which ought to be taught to students of the medical field, meets the DCNs and would be instrumental in future syllabuses.

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