What can clinicians do to reduce this potential difficulty some patients have recognizing the therapeutic effects of atomoxetine?
Dr. Feifel: This potential gap in perceived versus actual benefit can often be mitigated if clinicians take a more rigorous approach to evaluating atomoxetine’s therapeutic effects. This means not relying solely on nebulous, open-ended questions to assess a patient’s response to the medication, such as, “How are you doing?” or “Do you think the medication is working?” Given the subtle and insidious course of atomoxetine’s therapeutic effects, patients will often answer in the negative to such questions. The clinician must, in those cases, pursue a more meticulous line of questioning aimed at a patient’s specific target symptoms. This means that prior to starting treatment, a clinician should create, in conjunction with his or her patient, a short list of ADHD target symptoms that occur frequently enough and are debilitating enough for that particular patient that if a treatment works its impact would be clearly noticeable on these target symptoms. By doing this, clinicians and patients
