This course provides students the opportunity to learn by teaching, as they assist the course instructor in facilitating student learning.

This course provides a foundation for understanding the history and science of placebo effects with a focus on how these effects influence research design, therapeutics and health. A model of placebo effects – comprised of conditioning, expectation, social influence, and paradigm – is developed and applied to both health and common diseases in order to recognize that all health interventions are at least placebos. The question is whether they are anything more. The course structure and process include assigned readings, quizzes, creative class projects, studying advertisements, hearing from pharmaceutical company representatives, and class discussion designed to provoke critical thinking.

Learn how to change your mind. This course explores the evolving field of psychophysiology and its applications for therapeutic self-regulation in health care as well as its implications for the related fields of psychology, biomedical engineering, computer science, and medical economics. By focusing on the mind as an emergent phenomenon of bidirectional brain and body interaction, we realize how much of our own physiology we can and do self-regulate. We will review research on hypnosis, biofeedback, meditative strategies, and psychophysiological monitoring. The course structure integrates lecture, demonstration, discussion and individual self-monitoring projects. Weekly quizzes provide feedback on learning.

This course provides an opportunity for in-depth experiential learning through collaborative work on an independent research project.

This course will provide students the opportunity for independent study in a topic of strong interest.

This course is the introduction to professionalism, professional behaviors for the PA, and behavior science for the PA student. We will explore stereotypes and providers’ inappropriate (or lack of) knowledge and how this might influence access to care. The focus is non-somatic medical skills and knowledge needed to become a clinician who manages these issues with insight into human behavior. Topics will include issues related to age, socioeconomic status, cultural, racial, religious, ethnic and family diversity etc. We will seek out and develop tools to recognize facets (including risk factors for and signs/symptoms) of the above issues and of abuse issues. Setting this foundation in basic psychopathology and its relationship to understanding human illness is core to the PA student’s developing professionalism.

This is the first of a two-course sequence which will provide the physician assistant student with opportunities to prepare a formal graduate capstone project/paper. Projects may be in the form of: clinical practice essay, PA curriculum development, medically-related community service project, in-depth medical case review, meta-analysis of specific disease / syndrome, or original medical research. This capstone project/paper will build on clinical training and enable students to build skills for life-long learning as problem solvers and critical evaluators of medical and scientific literature.

This course will provide the physician assistant student with continued preparation of a formal graduate project for the PA Program. Projects may be in the form of: clinical practice essay, PA curriculum development, medically-related community service project, in-depth medical case review, meta-analysis of specific disease/syndrome, or original medical research. This course will culminate with the completion of the capstone project/paper which is founded in clinical experience and enables students to build skills for life-long learning as problem solvers and critical evaluators of medical and scientific literature.