About My Medical Practice

What I do - Behavioral Medicine

I focus on understanding the relationships among the environment, internal responses, behaviors, and health. This field of medicine is applied psychoneuroendocrinology and is sometimes called "behavioral medicine". Behavioral medicine essentially teaches self-healing and mind-body skills and has a strong record of improving outcomes when added to the usual medical treatment for numerous medical conditions. For an idea of what a behavioral medicince appointment is like please see treatment description.

While behavioral medicine uses many techniques from psychotherapy, the orientation in the behavioral medicine approach is somewhat different.

1. Treament is focused on training, not therapy. You are going to learn how to heal yourself, not be healed by the therapist.
2. The goal is to reduce symptoms rather than develop insight. It is more important to know how to get better than to know why you are sick.
3. Symptoms are reduced as you learn how to modulate your perceptions, internal responses, and behaviors.
4. Treatment requires practice outside of sessions.
5. Progress occurs in a stepwise manner, and each step has several phases.
6. Sessions are more frequent during a step, and less frequent or none between steps.

Each step in treatment has similar phases.

1. Discovering the most important skills for you to learn at the time.
2. Finding techniques that will develop those skills
3. Refining the techniques so you can use them effectively and efficiently.

Between steps you are applying the techniques and adapting them to various situations. After a period of time, you may want to explore other techniques and that will begin another step of training.