JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Cancer care requires clinicians to engage with the diverse beliefs, values, healing traditions, and lived experiences that shape patients’ healthcare decisions. Cultural humility, defined as an ongoing process of self-reflection, recognition of power imbalances, and openness to each patient’s perspective, shifts medical education beyond acquiring knowledge about particular groups toward respectful engagement with the individual patient. Yet cultural humility education varies widely across the health professions, and clinicians may be underprepared to discuss traditional and complementary health practices, which patients frequently do not disclose. In this Viewpoint, we propose integrative oncology as a practical educational model for cultivating cultural humility in cancer care. Integrative oncology is a patient-centered, evidence-informed field that incorporates mind-body practices, natural products, and lifestyle modifications from diverse traditions alongside conventional cancer treatment, creating a clinical context in which learners can engage different approaches to health and healing while maintaining attention to evidence and safety. We present an educational framework organized around 4 interconnected domains: cultural humility and self-reflection; mindful listening and shared decision-making; knowledge of diverse traditional and complementary approaches to health and healing; and evidence-informed evaluation. We illustrate how these domains can be applied through common clinical and educational scenarios and a standardized patient case, while emphasizing that the use of traditional or complementary therapies should not be presumed to reflect a patient’s cultural identity. We offer recommendations for faculty development, experiential pedagogy, and assessment and consider digitally enhanced approaches, including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, mobile learning, and gamification, that may support scalable and globally adaptable education. Future work should define core competencies, evaluate curricula across stages of oncology training, and develop meaningful measures of cultural humility and its effects on communication, recognition of bias, disclosure of traditional and complementary medicine use, shared decision-making, patient experience, and safety.