Half a dozen special sections and a number of independent articles in psychotherapy journals have recently addressed and debated empirically supported treatments (ESTs). Serious arguments have been presented in favor of the EST movement, while significant criticisms have also appeared. While acknowledging the importance of criticism on the process of developing the EST lists, this commentary re...

ests the medical man more than pyorrhoea. (2) It is so prevalent that he comes across it almost every day of his life. (3) There are very few diseases (dental, medical or surgical) that are so disastrous to the general health. (4) Yet there is no other disease of which medical men know less than of pyorrhoea. Causes?1. Sluggishness of the end-organ character of the blood circulation in the alve...

Efforts to increase the practice of evidence-based psychotherapy in the United States have led to the formation of task forces to define, identify, and disseminate information about empirically supported psychological interventions. The work of several such task forces and other groups reviewing empirically supported treatments (ESTs) in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere is summa...

The study of complex biological questions through comparative proteomics is becoming increasingly attractive to plant biologists as the rapidly expanding plant genomic and expressed sequence tag databases provide improved opportunities for protein identification. This review focuses on practical issues associated with comparative proteomic analysis, including the challenges of effective protein...

UNLABELLED We have developed a rapid, automated screening system and online database to detect foreign sequences of archaeal origin in human expressed sequence tags. The aim of the screening is to detect transcripts that may be derived from novel, putative archaeal pathogens or symbionts. AVAILABILITY http://psychro.bioinformatics.unsw.edu.au/pathogen/index.php.

The detection of differentially expressed genes from EST data is of importance for the discovery of potential biological or pharmaceutical targets, especially when studying biological processes in less characterized organisms and where large-scale microarrays are not an option. We present a comparison of five different statistical methods for identifying up-regulated genes through pairwise comp...

This paper presents a method for annotating coding and noncoding DNA regions by using variable order Markov (VOM) models. A main advantage in using VOMmodels is that their order may vary for different sequences, depending on the sequences’ statistics. As a result, VOMmodels are more flexible with respect to model parameterization and can be trained on relatively short sequences and on low-quali...

This article provides a critical review of the assumptions and findings of studies used to establish psychotherapies as empirically supported. The attempt to identify empirically supported therapies (ESTs) imposes particular assumptions on the use of randomized controlled trial (RCT) methodology that appear to be valid for some disorders and treatments (notably exposure-based treatments of spec...

A problem in EST clustering is the presence of repeat sequences. To avoid false matches, repeats have to be masked. This can be a time-consuming process, and it depends on available repeat libraries. We present a fast and effective method that aims to eliminate the problems repeats cause in the process of clustering. Unlike traditional methods, repeats are inferred directly from the EST data, w...

There has been an increase in recent years in the use of empirically supported treatments (ESTs) for a variety of mental disorders. This study was an investigation of the impact of standardized use of ESTs in an outpatient community clinic. Clients treated prior to and those treated after the implementation of this policy were compared. The results indicate significant group differences, with t...