Clinicians Vs. Researchers: Which is the Better Practice Within Mental Health?

This paper mainly discusses the difference between clinical researchers and clinical practitioners, as well as their views on why the other field is less prepared to deal with the problems of the patient. Researchers think that the clinicians are uninformed in their practice and need to back up their processes with actual scientific findings, but clinicians think the researchers are too broad in their hypothesis and do not focus specifically on the individual problem of the patient.

In order to correct these grievances each side has come to conclusions for the other. Clinicians think the researchers need to take a more individualistic approach to research and give more importance to case studies rather than group projects, and not focus so much on broad ranged statistics. Researchers found many discrepancies among medical practices and patient care. Clinicians often relied on secondary sources instead of research journals for their information. There was a study done with practitioners and researchers to determine what types of journals and how often they read, and it was surprising to find that the researchers read more often and also read nonscientific journals as well. However, it seems as though scientists are far removed from each other instead of communicating more directly like clinicians.

While I agree that both clinicians and researchers need to participate more in each process of gathering and divulging information with each other, I tend to side more with the clinicians since the researchers' practice depends so much more on the clinician's research rather than the clinician needing the researcher more. It is not entirely necessary for clinicians to refer to scientific studies for each individual patient, because sometimes science does not ask the right and applicable question.

Sometimes the right question is an interpersonal evaluation with the patient, and not a reference to a case. I believe in individual differences with each case and think that much more effort should be put into understanding and developing more case studies rather than generalized population samples. Overall we may, as a population, have certain things in common that are easily mulled over and painted in a general picture, but I believe that the real problems and issues for which we seek therapy are incredibly more complex and unique than to just pick a scientific study with 100 or so people from my peer group to compare me to. Oftentimes the relationship between the patient and clinician is what really offers most of the benefit to the patient and not always the methods used to aid them.

Works Cited

Beutler, L. E. (2004). The empirically supported treatments movement: A scientist-practitioner's response. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11, 225-229.