There are 180,000 new Diabetes Mellitus cases in Mexico each year (1). This chronic, complex and multifactor disease requires
an adequate nutritional management plan to be prescribed by family physicians. They should be trained to identify the potential
difficulties in the patient’s dietary schedule and orientate their management from an integrative point of view. The purpose
of this study was to detect and measure family physician’s clinical aptitudes for the nutritional management of Type 2 diabetes,
in a representative family physician’s sample from five Family Medicine Units of the Mexican Institute of Social Security
in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. A structured and validated instrument was applied to 117 physicians from a total of 450 in
Guadalajara, Jalisco. The main study variable was clinical aptitude for nutritional management of Type 2 diabetes. Aptitude
levels were defined by an ordinal scale and related to the other variables using the median, Mann-Whitney’s U test and Kruskal
Wallis (KW) test. Global results showed a median of 30 points that relates to a low and a very low aptitude level for the
72% of physicians without statistical significance (KW: p>0.05) with the rest of variables. These results reflect family physician’s
difficulties to orientate the nutritional management of Type 2 diabetes, as well as the lack of work environments that facilitate
case reflection and formative educational strategies.
Key words Clinical aptitude - nutritional management - type 2 diabetes mellitus - family medicine