Doctors Treat Anxiety Disorders With VideoConferencing
A woman with OCD starts with touching a doorknob. A doctor, watching via video conference, coaches her through it, helps her tolerate the uncertainty and tells her to ignore the impulse to scrub her hands. Progress. Next time, she will touch the floor of her kitchen, then her bathroom, and then she’ll rub her hands along the basement floor.
This patient is a typical participant in a Drexel-University study that bridges the gap between anxiety disorder patients and specialized professionals. Dr. Evan Forman and Dr. James Herbert, psychology professors and directors of Drexel’s Anxiety Treatment and Research Program, along with doctoral student Elizabeth Goetter, have pioneered a system that aims to close that gap using Skype videoconferencing to treat anxiety disorders remotely.
