To clarify how students' awareness is linked to their understanding of Kampo medicine, we carried out a questionnaire and test for 94 fourth-year medical students (MS) following all the lectures at Yamaguchi University School of Medicine.Gender was not associated with performance in the test.MS having been admitted to an undergraduate program had a significantly better performance record in the test than did MS who had passed the usual university entrance examinations (P < 0.0001).MS who had experienced the efficacy of Kampo medicine had a significantly better performance record in the test than did MS who had not.Understanding of both the merits and demerits of Kampo medicine, a desire to see bedside teaching of Kampo medicine currently or in the future, and a desire to integrate Kampo medicine with primary care in the future were associated with a better performance record in the test.Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that admission to an undergraduate program (odds ratio (OR) = 6.9) and having experienced the efficacy of Kampo medicine (OR = 4.5) were independently contributing factors to a good performance record in the test.Taken together, these results suggest that experiencing efficacy and bedside teaching are needed to increase understanding of Kampo medicine for MS.

A 25-question “Nationwide Kampo Web Test” was conducted to evaluate the basic knowledge and diagnostic ability of Kampo among medical professionals nationwide. We analyzed the scores of all 608 examinees (241 doctors, 257 pharmacists, 77 others, 12 acupuncturists, 10 nurses, and 11 dentists) and evaluated the test quality. The performance of all examinees was 67.7 ± 16.9 points (mean score ± standard deviation). Among the doctors, the mean score of Kampo medicine specialists (83.8 ± 8.7 points) was significantly higher than that of non-specialists (65.3 ± 16.3 points) (p<0.0001). The performance of doctors who prescribed 20 or more Kampo medicines (78.4 ± 11.5 points) was significantly higher than that of other doctors (p<0.0001). Among the 25 questions, the difficulty levels of 13, 8, and 4 were easy, moderate, and hard (correct answer rates: 70% or more, 40-70%, and less than 40%), respectively. The ability of 13 questions (52%) to distinguish between good and poor performers was extremely high (discrimination index of 0.5 or higher). Collectively, these results supported the good performance of our test, suggesting that it is a highly practical learning achievement evaluation system that could utilize information and communication technology and is expected to be used in future lifelong learning in the field of Kampo medicine.

At the 71st Annual Meeting of the Japan Society for Oriental Medicine held in August 2021, we performed a special program focusing on education in Kampo medicine, “Pre-graduation and post-graduation education in Kampo medicine for the next generation.” As a part of this project, we constructed the “Common Kampo test” based on the “Standard lectures on Kampo” as a web-based test using Moodle, and then the test was conducted in the form of a web test with 163 participants. The commentary of the “Common Kampo test” was live-streamed and was viewed by many participants, including students, educators and academics from all over Japan. In this paper, we report on the series covering the construction of the web system, creation of questions, answer results, and commentary on answers. With the recent popularization of tablet devices and smartphones, this web-based test system has the potential to become a scientifically based and optimal learning system not only for students but also for medical professionals such as doctors, pharmacists, and nurses.