Why do people change as a result of therapy

Psychotherapy and Neurobiology : A 21st Century Partnership to Improve Patient Care

The 21st century is identifying itself as a time of partnerships Partnerships in business and finance , politics , education and health care are becoming a global standard as countries are recognizing the benefits of shared knowledge and resources . Real-time access to information on a global scale provides accurate information vital to the success of shared initiatives

The same technological advances that have been responsible for the creation of new business models in world markets , have also changed how we look

at all aspects of life , including medicine . This will examine a new frontier in medicine that combines knowledge of the structural components of the human brain known as neurobiology , with knowledge of the psyche of the human mind and how this partnership may revolutionize psychotherapy

Knowledge of the effect of injury on the brain predates modern medicine . How the brain responds to information it receives and experiences , through physical trauma or psychological trauma , has until very recently , been a mystery . Little was known about the actual internal structure of the brain and whether or not the brain could actually recover from invasive investigation . It was not explored scientifically while patients were alive . Only after death was brain structure examined and tissue samples analysed . Review of details of the patient 's history , combined with lab results from tissue samples began to very slowly yield probable correlations between structural findings and disease . Physician-scientists began hypothesizing that because certain groups of symptoms and neurochemical and neurological findings were consistent from one patient to another , designing treatment regimens for these diss could yield positive results Many neuroscience experiments using laboratory animals followed and this painstaking research provided the world with treatment regimens for temporal lobe epilespy , Parkinson 's disease and depression . Following these experiments , it came to be realized that the only way to extend neuroscience research was to invade the human brain and test responses When researchers began to test the hypothesis that removing a small area of dysfunctional neural tissue in the temporal lobe region of the brain would stop life-threatening seizures in patients , they realized that having the patient remain awake during the procedure was the best way to assess surgical intervention . This would allow observation of any behavioral change , including a seizure , in the patient at the time of the tissue removal . This surgery was felt to be very radical at the time however , despite the inherent risks , it became a reasonably successful alternative in cases of uncontrollable temporal lobe seizures , and the observational data seen at the time of surgery led to many new research studies in neuroscience

At the same time that neuroscientists were experimenting with surgical intervention in temporal lobe epilepsy , psychiatrists and psychologists were attempting to provide behavioral modification strategies to the same patients in an attempt to decrease seizures in patients that seemed to have reactive triggers preceding a seizure . Psychotherapy was also felt to benefit epileptic patients experiencing anxiety as a result of...