Juntendo
  Japanese
top topics access messages department profile Health and Sports Science
Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine
Department of Gastroenterology(Graduate School of Medicine) | Japanese |  Index
 Introduction of Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology
The Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Juntendo University, was established in 1968. Prof. Sumio Watanabe took charge of the current department in September 2006. Today, about 100 physicians belong to the department. This is one of the largest clinical departments at Juntendo University, dispatching member physicians to 13 affiliated hospitals.
The target organs of our department may be thought to be gastrointestinal tract organs (esophagus, stomach, and colon). However, our department is committed to diagnosing and treating diseases not only in the esophagus, stomach, and colon, but also in a variety of organs such as the small intestine, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and peritoneum. We have about 65,000 outpatients yearly and 100 to 120 inpatients at all times. In particular, patients with malignant tumors (hepatic, stomach, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers) account for about one-third of the inpatients. For these patients, we have been providing endoscopic treatment, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy (anticancer drug treatment). In particular, techniques of endoscopic treatment have improved and early esophageal, gastric, and colorectal cancers can now sometimes be completely cured by endoscopic treatment alone instead of surgery. Therefore, endoscopic diagnosis has become increasingly important to find early cancer and we gastroenterologists are studying endoscopic treatment and examinations every day to further improve endoscopic treatment techniques. Hepatic cancer accounts for a large proportion of malignant tumors in the gastroenterology field, and it is known that type C hepatitis patients, in particular, are a high risk population for hepatic cancer. It is necessary to eradicate type C hepatitis virus at the stage of chronic hepatitis to prevent hepatic cancer. We have actively been preventing hepatic cancer by providing interferon therapy to eradicate the virus. We have also been engaged in not only malignant tumors but also benign diseases. In particular, we have focused on the development of new treatment for ulcerative colitis, which starts to develop in the latter half of the teens and 20s and is considered refractory to conventional treatment. A number of patients have come to our hospital and we have been evaluating them by clinical trials.
As mentioned above, being experts in gastroenterology and hepatology, our aim is to nurture well-balanced gastroenterologists equipped with a variety of techniques for medical practice and broad ways of thinking to deal with a wide range of target organs, instead of committing to narrow specialty fields of the gastrointestinal tract, liver, and pancreas. At the same time, we try to not only treat patients but also communicate with them and provide mental care.
 Education of medical school students by the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology
Clinical training in our department starts in the latter half of the fourth year of medical school. The aim of the training is for students to understand the basic issues involved in the diagnosis and treatment of gastroenterological diseases and to acquire the capacity applicable to actual clinical practice by seeing patients. In other words, students aim to learn techniques to collect necessary information from interviews with patients, to examine them, to understand the status of the disease, plan tests for diagnosis, and select the best treatment. To achieve these goals, medical students are assigned as members of the doctor team in the ward and they are trained by an instructor doctor in a person-to-person manner in the ward to understand the status of the disease of the assigned patients. Furthermore, they are expected to elucidate the pathogenesis of the cases and acquire the ability to select appropriate treatment by three-party discussions with the professor and an instructor doctor during the professor round. In addition, to understand the basics of gastroenterological diseases, small student groups (about six students each) are provided with a lecture, examination training, and training in seeing outpatients with the professor. Since the training period is as short as two weeks, training is very hard but has the characteristic that all members of our department, led by the professor, teach and take good care of students.

Department of Gastroenterology(Graduate School of Medicine) | Japanese |  Index
Copyright © 2005 JUNTENDO All Rights Reserved.
president dean School of Medicine Graduate School of Medicine