Treatments For Bipolar Disorder - Getting Good Evidence

If you have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, you may want to find out all you can about the medical treatments that are typically offered. When you’re looking for health information, it’s important that you get sound information based on evidence.

Medical practitioners make a big thing out of ‘evidence-based practice’. This simply means that any treatment must have evidence that it works and the risk of taking it is within acceptable limits. In practice this means that treatments are scientifically tested against other, established treatments.

So how do you know if a treatment is evidence-based? Many countries follow the decisions of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Therefore, in nations such as the US and Australia, FDA approval should mean your medicine has been scientifically tested to show that it works for your condition. (Sometimes the FDA has to think twice, but this is the general idea).

Okay. You know your medicine has been approved because it’s on the market, but you want to know how it works, whether you have to take it with a meal, what its side effects are, whether it interacts with your other medicine, how long before it wears off, and why is it so important to take it anyway!

You can run a search on your favorite engine, but how can you know the website you choose has accurate information? There are several web resources that check out the information on health websites and verify their accuracy, quality and ethics. One of the best-established is HoNcode at http://www.hon.ch/index.html. HonCode has a search facility that can direct you to accredited sites.

Wikipedia ( target=_new [http://www.wikipedia.org/]www.wikipedia.org) is not accredited, but has been found to be about as accurate as material compiled by traditional research and editing. I find it helpful, although some of the health material can use rather difficult clinical language.

So now you’ve done your desk research: what next? Follow up by speaking with your pharmacist or the clinician who prescribed the medicine. If you can, get an opinion from other people with bipolar disorder, or look up mental health consumer websites.

If you’re having side effects, especially if your doctor insists that you take the offending medicine, you might keep a diary of side effects. Make a note of the date, the unwanted symptoms and make a note of other drugs or alcohol that you also take. Take your diary to the doctor next time and you’ll be able to provide good evidence to argue your case. Often medicines can be switched or the dose lowered.

Many people just don’t want to take prescribed medicine. That’s okay, as long as you’re aware of the possible consequences of not taking it, for example getting sick again, wearing out your housemates, or even being ordered by a court to take the stuff. Most people I have spoken to have admitted going off their medication at one time or another; many decide to go back on it or try a different one.

The choice is up to each individual, but do yourself a favor: make your choice a well-informed one, based on evidence.

Madeleine Kelly is the author of Bipolar and the Art of Roller-coaster Riding (Two Trees Media ISBN 0-646-44939-7). More information about current treatments for bipolar disorder can be found at http://twotreesmedia.com/bipolartreatment.htm

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