Quality management in complementary and integrative medicine.

Quality management (QM) is an important tool for an effective and safe healthcare which also includes complementary and integrative medicine. Improving the three areas of quality (quality of structure, quality of process, and quality of results) is beneficial for patients and providers. Improvements of process, product and QM systems have a direct impact on time, quality, human resources, and costs.

What do patients in a lithium outpatient clinic know about lithium therapy?

Objective: To determine how much patients know about lithium therapy and to examine factors that might influence this knowledge.

Setting: Lithium outpatient clinic.

Patients: Patients (n = 123) affiliated with a lithium outpatient clinic (mean treatment duration of 12 years).

Protective effect of pregnancy in women with lithium-responsive bipolar disorder.

Background: Recent psychiatric literature, while indicating a high incidence of postpartum depression, contains a few clinical reports which support our observations that women with episodic bipolar disorder often remain well without treatment during pregnancy. Our retrospective study statistically examines the clinical course of 28 women with RDC typical bipolar disorder, type I, who became pregnant prior to receiving successful lithium prophylaxis.

Methods: We derived all data from the International Group for the Study of Lithium-treated Patients (IGSLI) database of excellent lithium responders.