Introduction
TCM
Clinical practice is the most crucial experience for undergraduate medical students [An alternative training approach could be the use of virtual standardized patient (VSP) programs, which use computerized characters for SP encounters [Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a comprehensive medical system that emphasizes the holistic concept of harmony between humans and nature. Its core principle is to maintain the balance between yin and yang, promote the circulation of qi and blood, and coordinate the different functions of various organs of the body. TCM clinical skills, such as inspection, auscultation and olfaction, palpation, and inquiry, are usually used to assess an individual’s overall health status. TCM practitioners often adopt various therapeutic methods to treat patients, such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, moxibustion, and However, using SPs in TCM education has several limitations; therefore, VSPs present a viable alternative. In the past, VSPs have not been used in TCM education due to technical limitations and the lack of promotion and traditional view. With the implementation of education informatization, an education reform, VSP programs have become more mature and widely acknowledged [In 2019, we formally established the VSP-TCM system and cultivated the ﬁrst batch of students trained using TCM-VSP. Subsequently, we integrated the VSP-TCM system into the PTC-IMTCM course and conducted training in VSP-TCM mode. In this study, we conducted a multifaceted analysis to compare the effects of VSP-TCM and traditional academic training on students’ clinical competence. We hypothesized that medical students who receive VSP-TCM training would achieve greater progress in clinical competency than those who receive traditional academic training. Our findings are expected to provide a reduced-cost and high-efficiency training mode in TCM medical education.