Prescribing therapeutic interventions through strategic treatment selection

This article describes the rationale and current research on Systematic Tre atment Selection, a method for matching and fitting inter ventions to patie nts and patient problems. An efficient method of treatment Planning must no t only use effective and empirically tested procedures, but should take int o account the fit of these procedures with important nondiagnostic informat ion about the patient, and aspects of the patient's environment. The effort to transfer research-based treatment manuals to clinical practice has ofte n failed because it requires therapists to give up procedures and theories that have been accepted on the basis of clinical experience and fails to co nsider ways in which patient qualities affect the fit of the treatment. Sys tematic Treatment Selection and its derivative, Pre scriptive Therapy seeks to overcome these difficulties by empirically defining general principles of treatment intervention and selection that cut across therapist theoretic al orientation and capitalize on the selection and use of methods that are favored by the clinician.