Author: admin
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Is Psychotherapy Better Than Medication?
The American College of Physicians has released a new clinical guideline on the treatment of depression in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They suggested that psychotherapy is as effective for treating depression as antidepressants, and “given its relative lack of potential harms, should be strongly considered as the first-line treatment.” This is consistent with the…
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Primary Care Providers to Screen all Patients for Depression
The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) now officially recommends that primary care health clinicians screen all of their patients for depression. Though this is wonderful, this is very, very long overdue. The costs associated with depression and other mental health screen are insignificant relative to the potential gains of “catching” otherwise unrecognized suffering patients.…
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Does more sex mean more happiness?
A really interesting paper just came out today that looked at, and challenged, the widely held belief that the more frequently you have sex the happier you are… and they discovered that this was simply not true. What the researchers did find was that most healthy couples had sex about once per week and that…
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Can Talk Therapy Change Your Brain?
I teach a great professional development and clinical consultation class at Loyola University Maryland. Yesterday morning my doctoral students and I had a great discussion about what makes psychotherapy work (among some other very stimulating discussions). This morning I received an email with a link to an article entitled, Revival of psychotherapy? How “talk” therapy…
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Life after Trauma
In the midst of a traumatic life event, our bodies have a knack of taking over; adrenaline pumps around the body and our natural survival instinct kicks in. But in the aftermath of such an event when the body’s defenses have come down again, we can begin to feel the effects elsewhere – this is…
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Disruptive behavior linked with safety problems
The Washington Post ran an article about a Tel Aviv University study of the effects of physicians’ disruptive behavior on patient safety. As discussed in previous posts, there is a clear link between disruptive behavior among physicians (and other professionals) and negative patient outcomes. The coworkers who are often the target of or witness to…
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Older women still enjoy active sex lives
A recently published article in the Annals of Family Medicine, yielded data that busted inaccurate stereotypes and myths about sexuality and aging in women. Nearly six out of ten women over the age of 60 reported being sexually active. The study interviewed more than 2,100 U.S. women ranging in age from 28 to 84, most…
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Therapy, Medication or Both (or Neither)?
I stumbled upon this brief piece in the Huffington Post about when patients should consider doing psychotherapy, trying medication, doing both at the same time or not doing anything at all. I liked this article because it was short and to the point while giving some nice examples behind the answer to the question: “it…
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Forgiveness
Over the years of doing psychotherapy with individuals and couples I have often observed a thematic trend from patient to patient. Sometimes I get a bunch of calls about relationship problems or several existing patients will bring up similar issues in the same week or even the same day. Lately I have noticed that I…