The recent article "Not enough researchers in the clinic?"1 is right on the mark. However, it fails to mention that not all clinicians are physicians. There is a critical need for scientist-clinicians in disciplines other than medicine such as clinical psychology, clinical nutrition, speech and language pathology, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. Within each of these health disciplines, clinician scientists are testing the effectiveness of their treatment interventions.
As health care increasingly focuses on the management of chronic illness, the integration of these nonpharmacological strategies with more traditional pharmacotherapy will be essential to maximizing positive outcomes. These interventions present specific difficulties in research design but they must be subjected to the most rigorous clinical research if we are to know what works best for whom.
These clinician scientists face many of the same pressures that physician clinician scientists do and require the same recognition and support that their physician...
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