Addictions: A Need for Specific Education

The field of addiction has long been of prime medical concern due to its serious repercussions for health. The rates of mortality and morbidity deriving from maladaptive habits (especially tobacco and alcohol consumption) are of the utmost relevance to public health in developed countries, above all because they are preventable. It is therefore imperative for any person involved in the medical profession to be proficient in understanding, assessing and managing addiction. Unfortunately, attitudes and beliefs in the medical profession towards people engaged in drug abuse or with addictive behavioral patterns continue to be negative, or even intolerant. Clinical staff in primary care and hospitals commonly place alcoholics and drug addicts very low on the list of patients they would like to treat. This bias influences the approach to healing and, clearly, represents an obstacle to resolving the problem. Therefore, specific training in addiction for all medical personnel is essential if we are to change this stigmatizing and counter-therapeutic attitude. With these two goals in mind the University of Girona Medicine Faculty has designed an elective course on addictions (complementary to the core course on Psychiatry) which aims to incorporate both scientifically-grounded knowledge and a change in attitude towards people with addictive disorders into the Problem-Based Learning curriculum of undergraduate medical students. In this paper we describe the module's structure, learning objectives, activities (lectures, workshops) and evaluation practices.