A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. Both words, treatment and therapy, are often abbreviated Tx, or Tx. As a rule, each therapy has indications and contraindications. There are many different types of therapy. Not all therapies are effective. Many therapies can produce unwanted adverse effects. Treatment and therapy are often synonymous, especially in the usage of health professionals. However, in the context of mental health, the term therapy may refer specifically to psychotherapy. A therapist is a person who offers any modality of therapy. Therapist refers to trained professionals engaged in providing services any kind of treatment or rehabilitation.
Semantic field
The words care, therapy, treatment, and intervention overlap in a semantic field, and thus they can be synonymous depending on context. Moving rightward through that order, the connotative level of holism decreases and the level of specificity (to concrete instances) increases. Thus, in health-care contexts (where its senses are always noncount), the word care tends to imply a broad idea of everything done to protect or improve someone's health (for example, as in the terms preventive care and primary care, which connote ongoing action), although it sometimes implies a narrower idea (for example, in the simplest cases of wound care or postanesthesia care, a few particular steps are sufficient, and the patient's interaction with the provider of such care is soon finished). In contrast, the word intervention tends to be specific and concrete, and thus the word is often countable; for example, one instance of cardiac catheterization is one intervention performed, and coronary care (noncount) can require a series of interventions (count). At the extreme, the piling on of such countable interventions amounts to interventionism, a flawed model of care lacking holistic circumspection—merely treating discrete problems (in billable increments) rather than maintaining health. Therapy and treatment, in the middle of the semantic field, can connote either the holism of care or the discreteness of intervention, with context conveying the intent in each use. Accordingly, they can be used in both noncount and count senses (for example, therapy for chronic kidney disease can involve several dialysis treatments per week). The words aceology and iamatology are obscure and obsolete synonyms referring to the study of therapies. The English word therapy comes via Latin therapīa from Ancient Greek: θεραπεία and means "curing" or "healing". The term therapeusis is a somewhat archaic doublet of the word therapy.
Types of therapies Therapy as a treatment for physical or mental condition is based on knowledge usually from one of three separate fields (or a combination of them): conventional medicine (allopathic, Western biomedicine, relying on scientific approach and evidence-based practice), traditional medicine (age-old cultural practices), and alternative medicine (healthcare procedures "not readily integrated into the dominant healthcare model").
By chronology, priority, or intensity
Levels of care Levels of care classify health care into categories of chronology, priority, or intensity, as follows:
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