gms | German Medical Science

Non-drug treatments have substantially increased in numbers and diversity in the past few decades: exercise for heart failure and COPD, ‘mirror’ therapy for post-stroke pain, the Epley manoeuvre for benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, cognitive therapy and case management for depression, ‘bibliotherapy’ (specific guided self-help books), to name just a few. In particular, interventions in eHealth and mHealth using computerized decision support or applications in hand-held devices have been boosted and nearly half a thousands of clinical trials conducted each year evaluate non-drug treatments.

However, methods in non-drug interventions are less well known, less well promoted, and often less well applied than in their pharmaceutical cousins. Methodological pitfalls, poor reporting but also resource constraints in funding often hamper the proper planning, conduct and dissemination of the results of non-drug trials. Additionally, barriers and facilitators for practice implementation are not systematically investigated and addressed resulting in poor uptake of interventions by health professionals and patients. In this key-note, methodological pitfalls and implementation barriers will be discussed and a recent initiative from The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) will be introduced. With the launch of the Handbook of Non-Drug Intervention (HANDI), RACGP aims to make ‘prescribing’ a non-drug therapy almost as easy as prescribing a drug.