Schizophrenia, sleep, and acupuncture

Schizophrenia is a complicated mental illness, which I feel is best left to the psychiatrists. Patients hate the side effects of medication. I don’t treat patients with schizophrenia with acupuncture: would this book change my mind?

A large collection of international experts have been drawn together to give their views on the diagnosis and medical treatment of the condition with a dedicated chapter on neuroimaging, which concludes only that schizophrenia is associated with frontal and temporal brain dysfunction. One quarter of the book is taken up with scientific discussion of the disease, which is covered well, but you have to ask yourself whether you would prefer to read this in a conventional medical textbook rather than a book on acupuncture.

The next two chapters look at sleep disturbance because “insomnia is associated with almost all psychiatric disorders” and a poor quality of life. An increase in total sleep with anti-psychotic medication, with an increase in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep …