Medical Family Therapy (MedFT), specifically, was originally advanced through a shared vision by Susan McDaniel, Bill Doherty, and Jeri Hepworth in the early 1990s. They recognized selleck compound that the application of family therapy’s systemic thinking

offered a biopsychosocial sensitivity to providing patients and families. They saw an opportunity for mental health providers to be trained to intervene in healthcare settings and with traditionally “medical” issues. Since then, researchers have noted the impact of health on families and visa-versa (Burman and Margolin 1992; Fan and Chen in press; Robles and Kiecolt-Glaser 2003; Wickrama et al. 2001). While McDaniel et al. (1992) envisioned MedFT as more of a metaframework rather than as a subdiscipline of family therapy, family therapists have moved forward with initiating training programs, certificates, and degrees in MedFT that provide mental health clinicians with intensive training in family therapy and its application in healthcare systems targeting medical conditions. In 2007, Linville et al. noted that MedFT needed more research, but more importantly that it lacked a cohesive definition because so many authors selleck chemical had added their own concepts to it

since it was first developed by McDaniel et al. (1992). Therefore, in 2010 Tyndall et al. embarked on a study using a Dephi method (Marchais-Roubelat and Roubelat 2011; Rowea and Wright 2011) to find out how experts were defining MedFT. The following is the definition that formally resulted. Medical Family Therapy is: an approach to healthcare sourced from a BPS-S [biopsychosocial-spiritual] perspective and marriage

and family therapy, but also informed by systems theory. The practice of MedFT spans a variety of clinical settings with a strong focus on the relationships of the patient and the collaboration between and among the healthcare providers and the patient. MedFTs are endorsers of patient and family agency and facilitators of healthy workplace dynamics (Tyndall et al. 2010). This new CYTH4 definition affirmed that many of the concepts Selleck Lazertinib highlighted 20 years ago are still critical to the implementation of MedFT today. However, the need for more overt inclusion of spirituality as a dimension of care and collaboration as a vehicle to successful intervention of patient-care and workplace dynamics was strongly punctuated. This special issue includes a range of articles designed to perturb our field to think about how we can better train and integrate ourselves to be valuable in healthcare settings, research, and policy. As described above, Susan McDaniel, Bill Doherty, and Jeri Hepworth first disseminated their ideas when they published their primer on Medical Family Therapy in 1992. In 2012, they will publish a second edition of this work.