Behavioral Medicine
Health, happiness, success, personal growth, and inner peace require constant work. Work at it every day, and learn to do it better the next day.
Health and Behavior
Stress and emotion appear to have important implications for the initiation or progression of cancer, HIV, cardiovascular disease, and other illnesses. Health-enhancing and health-impairing behaviors, including diet, exercise, tobacco use, and protection from the sun can compromise or benefit health and are directed by the role and interplay of biological, psychological, and social (biopsychosocial) factors in the way people feel, think, act, and how these affect their health and illness.
Changes in behavior and lifestyle can improve health, prevent illness, and reduce symptoms of illness. Behavioral changes can help people feel better physically and emotionally, improve their health status, increase their self-care skills, and improve their ability to live with chronic illness. Behavioral changes can also improve the effectiveness of medical interventions and reduce the overall costs of health care.
About My Practice and Behavioral Medicine
Behavioral medicine is a multidisciplinary field that takes a life-span approach to health and health care, working with children, teens, adults, and seniors individually and in groups, and working with racially and ethnically diverse communities in the United States and abroad. The primary purpose of behavioral medicine is to enable clinicians to understand the relationship between health and behavior and to deliver interventions that promote health, prevent disease, and manage chronic illness.
As a behavioral medicine specialist, I am:
- competent in the assessment of biopsychosocial factors affecting an individual’s overall health and well being including psychological, cognitive, behavioral, social, environmental, and biological/physical factors.
- skilled in developing and delivering psychological interventions to promote prevention and wellness and treat psychological conditions that affect health and illness.
- skilled in a broad range of psychological interventions and techniques, ranging from psychotherapy to targeted interventions such as stress-management, relaxation training, health promotion, and problem solving therapy.
- skilled in collaboration, consultation, and teamwork, which are essential to working within a multidisciplinary team of health professionals such as medical doctors (e.g. family medicine, psychiatry, neurology, cardiology), nurses, physician assistants, occupational therapists, physical therapists, exercise physiologists, nutritionists, social workers, counselors, speech-language pathologists, and public health professionals.
- an expert in contemporary research so as to rigorously conduct and apply scientific methods to understanding health and illness and be able to select and evaluate clinical treatment strategies based on established scientific knowledge and empirical support.
Treatment Specialties
My practice emphasizes an interdisciplinary understanding of biopsychosocial factors relevant to health and illness and the applications of this knowledge to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. I embrace evidence-based approaches to the assessment and treatment of:
Adolescent Health, Aging, Anxiety, Arthritis, Asthma, Cancer, Cardiovascular Disease (heart disease, hypertension, stroke), Chronic Pain, Cystic Fibrosis, Depression, Diabetes, Disease-Related Pain, Environmental Health, Headaches, HIV/AIDS, Incontinence, Insomnia, Low Back Pain, Minority Health, Myofascial Pain, Obesity, Pulmonary Disease, Quality of Life, Rehabilitation, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Social Support, and Substance Abuse (alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs).
Treatment strategies are explicitly aimed at reducing the overt physical and behavioral manifestations that constitute the patient's complaint. Common behavioral change interventions involve the use of psychotherapy, meditation, relaxation training, dietary control, stress management, and/or the application of environmental contingencies across the following three areas.
- Lifestyle Changes to improve nutrition, increase physical activity, stop smoking, use medications appropriately, practice safer sex, prevent and reduce alcohol and drug abuse;
- Skills Training related to relaxation, self-monitoring, stress management, time management, pain management, problem-solving, communication skills, time management, and/or priority-setting;
- Social Support and Therapy Groups focused on education, skill building, caretaker support and training, health counseling, and group therapy interventions.
Evaluation Services
I also provide specialized evaluations for requesting psychiatrists, medical consultants, employers, and various social service agencies. These services include:
* Comprehensive psychological evaluation of children, adolescents and adults;
* Chronic pain evaluations;
* Evaluation and referral of persons with chemical dependency;
* Aptitude and interests evaluation and career counseling;
* Cognitive assessments.