Anna van Wersch

This unique book is the first to bring together the world of health psychology with that of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The authors draw on their wealth of experience as health psychologists to explore the relationship between health psychology and CAM and look at how an understanding of one can be used to inform the other. Through an open-minded but rigorous approach to CAM, the authors identify where psychology can help to answer some crucial questions, such as why CAM sometimes appears to work, why sometimes it does not, and why some people are drawn to it and others not. Key topics covered include:models of the personhealth beliefs and experimental psychology placeboresearch methods in CAMstress, coping and stress managementpain and chronic illnesscommunications and interactions between client and therapistWhile CAM has often been dismissed out of hand by scientists, the authors maintain that it deserves attention as a psychological phenomenon alone, regardless of the actual efficacy as understood by existing research. This book's insightful observations on contemporary meanings of health and illness and the future of CAM and health psychology make it important reading for all psychologists and health professionals.

This bibliography presents studies of nonmedical factors (patient, clinician, and practice variables) that influence medical decision-making. Those factors include age, gender and presentational style of the patient; age, years in practice and attitudes of the clinician; and geographical location and list size of the practice. The authors separate such factors into two cateogories. The first is decision-making in the context of general patient management, such as test-ordering, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations. The second category is decision-making in the context of referrals made by generalists to specialists. Each published study identified from an extensive literature search is presented in a structured tabular format, with a brief summary of the study features described above. The studies cited were published in years spanning 1980 to March, 2001. Researchers and clinicians, as well as graduate and postgraduate students, in all medical disciplines will find this volume of interest, as will health psychologists, health economists and social psychologists. This work integrates published research about medical decision-making that has earlier only been fragmented and spread across a variety of journals. A chapter on methodological considerations in medical decision-making research and a chapter on models of medical decision-making are included.