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.
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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 classify health care into categories of chronology, priority, or intensity, as follows:
Urgent care handles health issues that need to be handled today but are not necessarily emergencies; the urgent care venue can send a patient to the emergency care level if it turns out to be needed.
In the United States (and possibly various other countries), urgent care centers also serve another function as their other main purpose: U.S. primary care practices have evolved in recent decades into a configuration whereby urgent care centers provide portions of primary care that cannot wait a month, because getting an appointment with the primary care practitioner is often subject to a wait list of 2 to 8 weeks.
Emergency care handles medical emergencies and is a first point of contact or intake for less serious problems, which can be referred to other levels of care as appropriate. This therapy is often given to patients before a definitive diagnosis is made.
Intensive care, also called critical care, is care for extremely ill or injured patients. It thus requires high resource intensity, knowledge, and skill, as well as quick decision making.
Ambulatory care is care provided on an outpatient basis. Typically patients can walk into and out of the clinic under their own power (hence "ambulatory"), usually on the same day. This care type also involves surgery which, according to recent research, offers "generally superior 30-day outcomes relative to inpatient-based care".
Home care is care at home, including care from providers (such as physicians, nurses, and home health aides) making house calls, care from caregivers such as family members, and patient self-care.
Primary care is meant to be the main kind of care in general, and ideally a medical home that unifies care across referred providers. The current trend in this area is digitalization aiming to ensure open access to information about therapy, issues, and recent progress on biomedical research.
By intervention
Invasive therapy is achieved either through surgery or through the use of drugs. Medical invasive treatments can be divided into two main categories: pharmacotherapy and surgery.
Noninvasive therapies are medical treatments that do not involve entry into the body. It can be classified into five main categories: neurotherapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, radiation therapy, and psychotherapy. The latest trend in noninvasive therapy is remote treatment, which is experiencing significant global growth via telecommunication technologies. Teletherapy encompasses three practices of remote treatment: telepsychiatry, telepsychology, and teleneurotherapy. This approach to medical treatment uses telecommunication technologies to provide exclusively mental or neurological therapy at a distance.