Introducing the new Health Psychology series "Evidence-based treatment reviews": Progress not perfection.

Introduces the new Health Psychology series "Evidence-Based Treatment Reviews." Psychologists struggle continuously with the tension between the general implications of research conducted in their treatment area and the often unique needs and treatment possibilities for their individual patients. Recent concerns about this struggle in psychology have led to the initiation of an American Psychological Association presidential taskforce to propose an evidence-based policy: Evidence-Based Psychology Practice (EBPP). This struggle is not new. Medicine, similarly, has been dealing with the issue of how to translate research findings into evidence-based assessments and treatments. The process of joining our research with our practice, known as Evidence-Based Medicine, will be the cornerstone of a new series of articles in Health Psychology, entitled "Evidence-Based Treatment Reviews." Evidence-Based Behavioral Medicine is an extension of the Evidence-Based Medicine movement that identified the necessity of critically evaluating research to inform clinical practice (Rosenberg & Donald, 1995). In addition to mentoring researchers in presenting their findings in a more user-friendly style (e.g., Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, or CONSORT, guidelines; Altman, Schulz, Moher, Egger, Davidoff, Elbourne, et al., 2001), teaching clinicians how to review the evidence (e.g., Evidence Based Medicine Tool Kit), and compiling and summarizing the existing evidence for public consumption (e.g., the Cochrane Collaboration), it makes sense to integrate these efforts by presenting research reviews with clinician commentary in our professional journals as has already been done by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, e.g., DeAngelis & Fontanarosa, 2002; Levinson & DeAngelis, 2002). We seek to add to the health psychology evidence base by including two articles for each topic chosen: an Evidence Review and a Clinician's Comment. For this series, we envision that three or four evidence-based reviews will be published per year in Health Psychology and that each review will be accompanied by a three- or four-page commentary by a clinician to aid in the application of the research to a clinical practice. In this format, we hope to capture both the state of the clinical science and the challenging art of translating it into clinical practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)