Chemistry-medicine interdisciplinary integration in medical education: a narrative review of teaching reform, evidence synthesis, and international perspectives

Medical chemistry serves as an indispensable bridge connecting foundational chemical sciences with clinical medicine, yet traditional discipline-based teaching models create a persistent gap between chemical principles and clinical practice. This narrative review establishes a five-dimensional analytical framework—driving forces, curriculum restructuring, pedagogical innovation, practical translation, and outcome evaluation—developed from the multidisciplinary-interdisciplinary-transdisciplinary integration continuum, competency-based medical education theory, and constructive alignment principles. The framework, with the traditional discipline-based teaching model as the comparison baseline, is applied to systematically examine 105 studies from 2016 to 2025, identified through a reproducible search protocol across PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, and CNKI. The analysis reveals a progressive evolution from knowledge-service to competency-construction paradigms across multiple national contexts. Curriculum restructuring has advanced through a complementary three-stage trajectory, with clinical-topic spiral modules demonstrating superior knowledge transfer in settings with established cross-disciplinary faculty collaboration. Pedagogical innovation has achieved contrastive complementarity between case-based and problem-based learning, supported by Bayesian network meta-analysis evidence, though reported effect sizes are moderated by implementation fidelity, class size, and assessment alignment. Experimental teaching reform has progressed along a four-stage trajectory toward interdisciplinary innovative experiments, with virtual simulation addressing infrastructure constraints in resource-limited settings. A multi-level assessment framework, operationalized through an instrument-outcome matrix linking knowledge, clinical reasoning, practical skills, and long-term outcomes, is proposed to replace the current fragmented evaluation landscape. Three persistent bottlenecks—cross-disciplinary faculty development, resource integration mechanisms, and evaluation standard unification—constrain further progress. The review's findings are framed with appropriate caution, acknowledging the predominance of single-center small-sample studies that limit generalizability, and recognizing that high-quality educational research can employ diverse methodologies beyond randomized controlled trials.