Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a serious psychiatric illness with a high lifetime prevalence rate and causes major clinical, social and economic burden to patients and their family. Despite that more than 40 antidepressants with various mechanisms are available on the market, half of patients fail to achieve remission with optimized medication treatment because of unsatisfactory efficacy, frequent intolerability and poor compliance of pharmacotherapies. However, Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a safe and effective therapy which has many previous evidences to improve the treatment of depression. The aim of this project is to build up a TCM clinical daycare model for depression patients, and to establish a teaching platform for TCM trainees.
The TCM daycare model will be provided by a team organized by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, psychologist, nutritionist and case managers. This model will provide a comprehensive TCM care system to improve the clinical symptoms and quality of life of depression patients.
