Mental disorders in general medical practice - An opportunity to add value to healthcare

We at Behavioral Healthcare Tomorrow are pleased to present an article that has a different format from our usual fare. This piece contains the highlights of a slide show adn accompanying lecture notes developed by the Academy for psychosomatic Medicine. It presents statistics that reveal the impact of behavioral illness on general medical practice, and illustrates why an integrated system may be crucial to effective diagnosis and treatment. The data presented here focus on the high number of behavioral disorder sufferers who get lost in the general healthcare system. We think you will find this article user-friendly. If you are interested, we will be publishing the unabridged slide set and lecture notes in the Winter edition of a new series of works on the medical off-set effect. For an article on a related topic, please turn to page 31, for ''Barriers to Integration of Primary and Behavioral Healthcare'', written by Steven Cole and Mary Raju. That article explores the reasons why integration is difficult to implement and proposes a training program to increase physicians' knowledge and skill in recognizing psychosomatic disorders.