Posted by Althea8869 on February 4, 2004, at 21:07:08
In reply to Re: Therapy in addition to meds?, posted by eugenia on February 3, 2004, at 17:37:39
This is actually a very intersting question about the value of therapy. The answer, which may surprise most is that therapy can be even more effective than medication for curing depression. Case in point: A little over a year ago there was an article in Scientific American that discussed this very thing. They set up a study where they took a significant group of people who where suffering from mild to moderate depression and to one set, just serzone was prescribed(I think it was serzone) and to the other set, they just used CBT. Before the study was begun, both groups underwent PET(proton emmision tomography) Scans of their brains. This was repeated each week for 3 months. AT the end of the three months the physiological changes to the brain(from baseline) of just those that believed their conditions had improved were identical...thats right folks...identical. It is for this reason that the highest response rate for treatment is ALWAYS a combination of medication with therapy. This study was actually repeated(for obvious reasons) at Mass General and the results were nearly identical. So for those inclined....
poster:Althea8869
thread:308972
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040204/msgs/309529.html