Physiology is the organizing principle of the medical model. This is the reason that a medical illness is defined as a physiological variance from a normal range. Physicians conduct medical assessments and use laboratory tests of organ function to identify if there is any physical disorder. Physical measurement is necessary to justify medical therapy that is intended to change physiology. Measuring physiology permits individualized therapeutic recommendations that are logical and likely to yield a favorable clinical outcome.

Contrasting with the physiological organizing principle of the medical model, treatment selection in psychiatry remains based primarily on symptoms and behaviors. These are sorted and classified by a list of syndromes called DSM-IV (DSM) disorders. Psychiatrists use interviews, rating scales and performance measures to describe a patient’s behavioral syndrome and as the basis for selection of medical treatment. However, clinical experience makes obvious that there is no consistent relation between these symptoms and behaviors and response to neuroactive medications. A set of symptoms and behaviors may suggest a mental disturbance, but does not specify the nature of a person’s neurobiology or that person's likely response to neuroactive medication.

This explains the low rates of treatment outcomes that are observed in psychiatry. Lacking a measure of individual brain function in these disorders, psychiatric medication selection remains educated guessing and medication response a chance occurrence.

To improve the random nature of psychiatric therapeutics, in 1986 our laboratory began electroencephalographic (EEG) and quantitative EEG (QEEG) medical research. We sought to distinguish differences in individual brain function and improve psychiatric therapeutics in populations who suffer with mental disorders. This research evolved into an EEG method that identifies features of brain function underlying a broad range of psychiatric syndromes. In this procedure, a prospective patient’s EEG data is compared with a large, clinical outcome database of heterogeneous EEG’s and their diverse medication responses. The prospective patient’s EEG data is then mathematically classified and correlated with neuroactive medication(s) likely to improve his/her particular brain function.

Our laboratory has retrospective, double blind prospective and unblinded prospective medical research, which demonstrates the ability of individual EEG data to improve medication selection and treatment outcomes in certain DSM disorders. Our growing EEG database includes children (from six years of age), teenagers and adults (to ninety years of age) with a broad range of DSM diagnoses. Diagnoses involving mood (depression), attention, learning, eating (anorexia and bulimia), chemical dependency or substance abuse, anxiety, panic, insomnia, chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, various tic disorders, obsessions and compulsions are represented. The database also contains patients with chronic headaches, including refractory migraine headache and/or other pain disorders.

Currently Dr. Emory is working with other physicians and institutions in order to integrate his research and approach into the practice of general internal and family medicine. This will allow physicians to more effectively diagnose and treat patients with a broad range of medical symptoms allowing both patients and doctors to benefit from this ground-breaking research.