Placebo controls are commonly used in clinical trials of investigational treatments because they have important advantages. In recent years, some have criticized the use of placebo-controlled trials when effective alternative therapy exists, regardless of the expected effect of the therapy. In part 1 of this paper, ethical arguments are addressed and the interpretive problems inherent in the us...

Many contemporary bioethicists claim that the possession of certain psychological properties is sufficient for having full moral status. I will call this the psychological approach to full moral status. In this paper, I argue that there is a significant tension between the psychological approach and a widely held model of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disord...

Professor Sami Timimi recently expressed concerns about the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. We argue that the concerns are largely unfounded and provide readers with an update on the programme.

Families of children with chronic health conditions are often treated in primary care settings. A guidance report has highlighted the importance of coordinated care and training primary care teams, including nurse practitioners, to deliver psychological interventions (Royal College of Psychiatrists and Royal College of General Practitioners, London, 2008). Although psychological therapies are b...

Type 1 Diabetes mellitus is known to have a major psychological impact on adolescents. Different types of therapies have been developed to support the patient as well as their families to deal with this impact. These include Behavioral Family Systems Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. However, studies conducted recently, though few in numbers have shown a direct relationship between gene...

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin condition with significant physical and psychosocial comorbidity. A workshop of leading experts in dermatology and psychology with the purpose of better understanding the current role of psychological comorbidities in psoriasis was held by the International Psoriasis Council in November 2013. The role of stress reactivity with a focus on the hypothalamic...

BACKGROUND Psychological therapies have been developed for parents of children and adolescents with a chronic illness. Such therapies include parent only or parent and child/adolescent, and are designed to treat parent behaviour, parent mental health, child behaviour/disability, child mental health, child symptoms and/or family functioning. No comprehensive, meta-analytic reviews have been publ...

introduction: solar lentigines are among commonest cosmetic problems. there are many topical therapies suggested to treat these lesions including cryotherapy, chemical peeling with tri chloro acetic acid (tca) and laser therapy with q-switched lasers as well as long pulsed lasers. considering possible treatment side effects (pih, scar) with cryotherapy and peeling in iranian patients (darker sk...

results the mean age in breathing technique with lavender and breathing technique alone were 25.5 ± 4.3 and 26 ± 4.9, respectively .two groups were comparable in this regards (p = 0.6), but the length of active phase in interventional group was 7.85 ± 3.85 hours and in the control group it was 9.88 ± 6.65 hours. the decrease of the length of labor in the active phase was higher in the experimen...