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Advantages of Dismantling Treatment Strategy

Dismantling treatment strategy is a specific method of studying the various parts of any treatment package. In cancer treatment, for example, one might have a package of chemotherapy, dietary restrictions and radiation. A dismantling strategy might be usable to figure out which of the three parts of the package are doing the most harm to the malignancy. The applications of this approach are endless.

  1. Eliminate Unnecessary Treatment

    • The primary advantage of a dismantling strategy is the ability to eliminate unnecessary treatments or medications. If clinical research trials (which are the only means of doing a dismantling strategy) show that medication "x" is doing all the work while medication "y" is merely a support medication, then "x" will, in the future, be prescribed first.

    Psychological Advantages

    • In psychology, the benefits are clear. If a patient is on an antidepressant medication and is also in weekly therapy, a dismantling strategy might be used to figure out which of these two approaches is helping the patient make progress. A research program might be envisaged that has people with similar depressive symptoms taking such an antidepressant, while another group just goes to weekly therapy. If the evidence shows that the medication is doing all the work, then therapy might be stressed less in the future or used in conjunction with the antidepressant only in severe cases.

    Saving Money

    • This approach saves money and resources. If, to use another example, radiation is shown, by itself, to be a poor treatment of certain kinds of cancer, then only chemotherapy will be used in the future on such cancers. Using this hypothetical example, the future treatments of certain kinds of cancer would then be based only on chemo, saving the patient the pain and expense of radiation.

    Ensuring Only What Is Necessary

    • Patients receive the greatest benefit of dismantling strategy, because they will only be prescribed the treatments that have been proven to work. For example, in bipolar mental illness, it is often common to prescribe an antidepressant, such as Prozac, along with an antipsychotic, such as Seroquel. Dismantling strategy seeks to figure out which of these two medications is doing the work of healing patients. It might be that the antidepressant does nothing in bipolar cases, while the antipsychotic is doing all the work. Therefore, patients in the future would only be given an antipsychotic, saving money and the medical problems that derive from too much medication.

    Doctors

    • Ultimately, patients receive the benefit of dismantling strategies by getting the minimum amount of medication and treatment necessary for recovery. It might be that doctors, fearing lawsuits, may prescribe too much medication to gain the same result as a single medication. Only dismantling strategies can separate out the medications and treatment forms to see which are doing the work of healing, which are only for support, and, even, which are wholly inert.

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