Recently, some American general hospitals have organized medical-psychiatric units for patients with concomitant medical and psychiatric disorder. These services have attracted considerable interest for their psychosomatic features, namely the treatment of patients who require acute hospital care and cannot be managed adequately either in a standard psychiatric unit or in the medical-surgical wards of the general hospital. In due course, however, as often happens with innovations, the establishment of medical-psychiatric units has also come in for criticism and evaluation. Different models of medical-psychiatric services are discussed and compared.
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