This commentary reports on the steps that the Penn State Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health and affiliated College of Medicine have taken to ensure safety, while facilitating meaningful learning experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stigma in physicians' attitudes toward psychiatric patients has been reported as already present in medical school. This study examined implementation of an antistigma intervention curriculum to reduce medical students' stigma toward psychiatry.
Most evidence-based treatments for borderline personality disorder (BPD) are prohibitively lengthy and intensive. This study explores a psychoeducational group intervention as a possible treatment alternative for this underserved patient group.
Do you know what to say if a patient asks about genetic testing for a particular condition? This review from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics discusses challenges and presents recommendations about the need for informed genetic counseling in psychiatry. Read the article and delve into this increasingly important topic.
Treatment nonadherence is bipolar disorder ranges from 20% to 60%. Read this article to learn how customized adherence enhancement (CAE)—a brief, bipolar disorder-specific approach that targets individual adherence barriers—compared with an education control in patients with bipolar disorder.
A variety of pharmacologic agents are available for treating your patients with bipolar disorder, but have you considered adding psychoeducation to your armamentarium? This review summarizes the evidence on 4 modalities: individual, group, family, and internet-based. Read it to see which were the most effective.
It's been shown that educating patients about potential adverse effects of a drug can increase the chances that those effects will be experienced. Here, Dr Andrade compares ways in which clinicians can deliver important information about side effects so that placebo-related benefits are enhanced and nocebo-related harm is minimized.
Sleep disorders are highly prevalent in association with psychiatric disorders, but the capacity for their recognition is often lacking among psychiatrists. The authors of this study assessed the current state of sleep medicine training in psychiatry residency programs in North America. Their findings may surprise you.
Although psychoeducation can benefit patients with borderline personality disorder, the lack of trained personnel and the cost of implementation have prevented widespread adoption of this treatment. Read this article to learn if a web-based psychoeducation program—designed to overcome these barriers to access—improved symptomatic and psychosocial functioning in women with borderline personality disorder.
Early evidence suggests that exercise may be an effective treatment approach for stimulant use disorders. Here, find out if exercise was superior to a health education intervention in reducing stimulant use days in more than 300 RCT participants.
Baclofen, a French Exception, Seriously Harms Alcohol Use Disorder Patients Without Benefit
To the Editor: Dr Andrade’s analysis of the Bacloville trial in a recent Clinical and Practical Psychopharmacology column, in which he concluded that “individualized treatment with high-dose baclofen (30-300 mg/d) may be a useful second-line approach in heavy drinkers” and that “baclofen may be particularly useful in patients with liver disease,” deserves comment.1
First, Andrade failed to recall that the first pivotal trial of baclofen, ALPADIR (NCT01738282; 320 patients, as with Bacloville), was negative (see Braillon et al2).
Second, Dr Andrade should have warned readers that Bacloville’s results are most questionable, lacking robustness. Although he cited us,3 he overlooked the evidence we provided indicating that the Bacloville article4 was published without acknowledging major changes to the initial protocol, affecting the primary outcome. Coincidentally (although as skeptics, we do not believe in coincidence), the initial statistical team was changed when data were sold to the French pharmaceutical company applying for the marketing authorization in France. As Ronald H. Coase warned, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.”
MY ACCOUNT