Abstract
The Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) has announced that, effective in 2023, physicians applying for ECFMG Certification will be required to graduate from a medical school that has been appropriately accredited. To satisfy this requirement, the physician’s medical school must be accredited through a formal process that uses criteria comparable to those established for U.S. medical schools by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education or that uses other globally accepted criteria, such as those put forth by the World Federation for Medical Education. In response to this announcement by ECFMG, we must grapple with the core-curriculum proposal of behavioral medicine which satisfy the items as follows: 1) the core-curriculum achieves the globally accepted criteria, 2) it also follows the international trends of behavioral science and medicine, and 3) it also includes the behavioral science and medicine established originally in Japan. To make the appropriate core-curriculum of behavioral medicine, we must define what behavioral science is. In this article, I proposed the framework of behavioral science and the role that Japanese Association of Behavioral Science (JABS) should achieve through the introduction of the history of JABS, the special fields of the JABS members, and the academic activities of JABS.
