[Effective factors in multifamily therapy in patients with eating disorders : Critical appraisal and implications for practice].

Multifamily therapy (MFT), the treatment of several families simultaneously, is an established method of psychotherapy used in a wide range of diagnoses. However, there is limited knowledge about the exact factors of action of this treatment method. The development of MFT as a separate form of therapy is presented, as are its previous applications in the treatment of patients with eating disorders.

Single, very low rituximab doses in healthy volunteers - a pilot and a randomized trial: implications for dosing and biosimilarity testing.

There are no  dose-finding trials available for rituximab that could guide dosing in non-malignant diseases. We hypothesized that currently used doses (≥375 mg/m) exceed several hundred-fold the half-maximal effective dose, which is most sensitive for detecting putative differences between biosimilars and important for dose finding. In an open label, exploratory trial healthy volunteers received single infusions of rituximab at doses of 0.

The leaf-area shrinkage effect can bias paleoclimate and ecology research.

Premise Of The Study: Leaf area is a key trait that links plant form, function, and environment. Measures of leaf area can be biased because leaf area is often estimated from dried or fossilized specimens that have shrunk by an unknown amount. We tested the common assumption that this shrinkage is negligible.

[Changes in pensioning and psychosomatic assessment].

Appropriate evaluation of a patient's handicapping or disabling conditions, of his or her capacity for work and gainful activity rank among the recurring tasks in inpatient rehabilitation. Published recently, the Beeinträchtigungsschwere-Score (BSS; a score for determining the severity of a condition) constitutes a highly practicable instrument for these purposes, well suited to the clinical setting. Particular difficulties are encountered in the assessment of patients already in the pension award process, a population where the original disease picture has been superimposed by numerous chronification factors of a psychological, social and economic nature so that a so-called invalidity pensioning career has set in.

[Psychosomatic disorders in the area of environmental medicine. Environmental medicine--environmental psychology].

In environmental medicine, we frequently see patients who have a very firm, sometimes fixated view of the nature of their disease, and they do not except the correction by the physician but only confirmation. Therefore, we face the task to undertake these patients a careful medical and psychological differential diagnosis. In a major number of cases, the symptoms are caused not by supported environmental effects but by an unknown diagnosis, and recognition and treatment would be impossible in case of an uncritical adoption of the patient's illness theory.

[Psychoanalysis of self injury].

Psychoanalytic aspects of diseases with self-inflicted mutilation (factitious diseases and Munchhausen syndrome) have been investigated increasingly within the last years in the setting of long term ambulatory and hospital treatments. The author describes in this report how these disease states may also be interpreted as equivalents of remembrance and can be understood as inadequate attempts for self assistance. He outlines possibilities for psychotherapy arising in view of this background.

[Psychosomatic disorders in the new German states. Findings and background information].

The sociopsychological background and the conceptual problems in understanding the individual experience of the far reaching changes in the living after the remification of Germany is discussed. It is attempted by the analysis of treatment courses from a psychosomatic hospital to identify typical clinical pictures, trigger situations, or pathopsychological features in especially affected patients coming from the new states. From the author's experience, this is not possible.

[Progress in disability pensions for psychosomatic patients].

Only part of the invalidity pensioning courses seen can be traced to medically substantiated illness and disablement. Another part of these courses, with an extraordinarily high share in particular from the psychosomatic field, consists of a gradual psychosocial down-grading which, though possibly triggered by illness and disablement, essentially is enhanced, or countered, by specifies of individual personality, family, labour market, or medical doctors' behaviour. The matter dealt with only seems to be a dry one.

Inpatient and outpatient long-term psychotherapy of patients suffering from factitious disorders.

A favorable therapeutic course is achieved by the combination of an initial clinical psychotherapy and a subsequent analytical long-term treatment implemented as an outpatient therapy or an interval therapy. This form of therapy was offered to all of the patients and was accepted by half of the patient collective, i.e.

Diagnosis of narcissistic self-esteem regulation in patients with factitious illness (Munchausen syndrome).

A quantitative taxonomy for the identification of patients with narcissistic pathology and with borderline personality disorders based on test results is presented. The quantitative identification of these subgroups was produced using a Q-factor analysis. Based on the correlation of the subjects by means of the 241 questions from the narcissistic inventory of Deneke and Müller [27], three subgroups could be defined.

[Organ worlds: basic principles of analytic body psychology].

In this article, the author introduces the expression organ fantasies, pathological zones in the body self and organ world with the intention of formulating an analytical psychology of the body. He presents the view that a person's own body has the significance of a primary object which, under normal circumstances, enables a person to make several important basic experiences, such as the experience of being alive, of having a body, and of being separate from others. On the basis of this work with borderline patients, the author demonstrates that the pathological zones in the body self can be understood by means of a phase model and that the illness-producing effect of a pathological organ world is related to a defective symbolization of experiences.

[Secret self mutilation, a psychosomatic disease].

The present article contains initial results form systematic psychoanalytic work with patients practicing secret self-mutilation (our term for these is "mimicry patients"). The group we examined was treated on an in-patient basis in a hospital for psychosomatic disorders. The article may be considered as a preliminary report.

[Borderline structure and painful skin hemorrhages: a case of Gardner-Diamond syndrome].

The Gardner-Diamond Syndrome is an infrequently diagnosed impressive psychosomatosis. The patients (exclusively female) suffering from this disorder are described as "angry young women". They are considered hysterical, masochistic, depressive, hostile and timid.

[Headache and perception].

Attacks of migraine can be caused by a spasmodic overexertion of perception which has neurotic origins. In such cases massive intolerance with regard to depressive episodes and helplessness is observed in the patients. This can be plausibly explained on the background of unsolved infantile conflicts.