Despite diversity in our backgrounds and training, we share one common purpose in our professional lives -- to ease the suffering of our patients and help them achieve the happier, more successful lives they deserve.

Through my own personal learning journey, I have come to develop, test and use Lifetrack therapy. It has been highly effective with wide-ranging and often challenging patients over the last 30 plus years of my full-time private practice.

I believe I have developed a new and highly effective way of understanding and treating mental health problems, and I would like to share some of the tools with my colleagues through www.lifetrack.com. At this site, you can track your patients every day.

I treat all my patients using the Internet-based Lifetrack program and cannot imagine practicing without it. In my full-time practice, I treat about 20 to 30 patients at any given time (less than 100 patients a year). All are on the Lifetrack method and performing daily self-rating. Indeed, I feel severely handicapped without a comprehensive and daily tracking of each patient's progress, as if I am a captain of a ship without a compass or a manager of a company without a reliable accounting system.

I believe you too will find the Lifetrack program to be an indispensable tool to help your patients achieve and exceed their previous best level of adjustment.

All my patients enter their daily self-rating data through the Internet at their leisure before coming to each session, and they can analyze their daily self-tracking graphs at home. This allows my patients to be active participants in building and maintaining their own health, rather than passive participants in therapy once a week.

Daily tracking reminds them that building health is a daily exercise. It is about actively changing the way they think, feel and act in the key spheres of their lives: self, intimacy and achievement. When a patient comes to a therapy session, we are ready to look at his or her up-to-date daily self-tracking graphs as soon as we sit down, or as soon as the patient calls for a phone session.

During each therapy session with my patients, I go over their daily self-tracking graphs in depth. Thanks to the Internet-based Lifetrack program, I can review and analyze patients' graphs and conduct therapy sessions when I am away from the office, as long as I have a laptop computer and access to a phone line.

My patients can keep appointments for sessions when they are traveling away from home or when they cannot come to my office for a scheduled session for any reason. I have personally found phone sessions just as (sometimes more) productive as in-person sessions. In fact, some of the most successful outcomes I have had with challenging patients have been achieved entirely over the phone.

Some of my patients keep tracking themselves daily long after their therapy is successfully completed to make sure that they do not forget what they learned in therapy. Should they need to consult with me in the future on short notice, their daily self-tracking graphs provide a wealth of data that are indispensable to effective consultations. It is also comforting to know that I have instant access to all my patients' daily progress whenever I want and wherever my patients or I happen to be.

Excited and happy as I am about Lifetrack, I am also fully and painfully aware that Lifetrack is not for everyone. In fact, Lifetrack may work well with only a minority of practicing professionals.