Behavioral Intervention in Health Care

It has been demonstrated that many medical problems, including insomnia, alcoholism, hypertension, headache, pain, obesity, and asthma, respond readily and reliably to behavior modification techniques. Yet, behavioral intervention has traditionally been a difficult area to assimilate into the medical and nursing curricula. In this text, Dr. Laura B. Cordon presents a behavioral-psychological perspective on intervention in health care, beginning with a definition of behavioral medicine and introducing the related issues of stress and patient compliance. With an emphasis on how behavioral intervention relates to clinical practice, Dr. Gordon examines such topics as the role of the patient’s behavior in the symptom or disease, how the health care professional can identify those who will respond well to individual or family counseling, and the treatment of disease versus the maintenance of health. She concludes with an explanation of the need for less conventional facilities for treating psychophysiological and stress/tension disorders, pointing to the program currently in use at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center as one possible alternative approach.