Integration of women's health into an internal medicine core curriculum for medical students

The authors describe their year-long collaboration to analyze and integrate the elements of women's health into their medical school's core curriculum in internal medicine for the third-year clerkship. Such a process was nece ssary because the current curriculum was inadequate in its treatment of wom en's health (e.g., little or no coverage of issues pertaining to women in t eaching about certain disorders; lack of female subjects in many research s tudies; study designs' using standards derived from manifestations of disea ses in men; the cross-discipline aspects of women's health). The authors il lustrate the new curriculum by discussing the revised module in pulmonary m edicine; they detail the steps they took to uncover problems and omissions in the existing curriculum and in the literature on the topic, and how they remedied these. (For example, in a case involving a man with pulmonary emb olus, one of the new questions for students is "What questions would you as k if this patient were a woman?") They comment on the challenges they faced in revising the curriculum, including lack of protected time, lack of suff icient data about women's health, inherent sex and gender bias in the liter ature and educational materials, need to make students aware of the importa nce of sex and gender considerations in patient care, and the ingrained bia s of faculty, including the authors. Their process can be adapted and used to integrate curricula in other emerg ing interdisciplinary fields, such as cross-cultural medicine and gay and l esbian health. The authors conclude that collaboration between students and faculty, as illustrated in their own efforts, is one way to ensure that fu ture practitioners are optimally trained to treat patients in the ever-chan ging field of medicine.