The POMS (Profile of Mood States) was used to investigate changes in mood and affect that appeared after the Portrait therapy, a method conceived and initiated by Kenichi Muraoka in 2006. The subjects consisted of 46 new nurses (1 male, 45 females, average age 23.09 years); 1 patient hospitalized in the palliative care ward (1 male in his 80s) and 1 family member attending therapy sessions (1 female in her 60s); 3 ward nurses (1 male, 2 females, average age 38.67 years); 3 students participating in hands-on training (3 females, average age 21.67 years);and an additional 3 staff members (3 males, average age 40.67 years). The POMS was administered before and after the Portrait therapy, and the changes in POMS score were examined. The new nurses showed a significant improvement in mood across all 6 subscales of the POMS. There was a general improvement in mood among the participants from the palliative care ward, exeluding the nurses. The Portrait therapy proved to be an effective means of improving the mood of participants, and bystanders as well, depending on their position. While due care is needed before implementing the Portrait therapy in a hospital ward, this therapy is a viable emotional care alternative, and is also potentially meaningful in the context of grief care. In the future, we intend to follow up with case studies and quantitative studies to find more effective Portrait therapy applications.

Animals ; Glutamic Acid ; analysis ; toxicity ; Guinea Pigs ; Microscopy, Immunoelectron ; Vestibule, Labyrinth ; chemistry

  In 2008, Japanese Society of Drug Informatics (JASDI) organized the Future Vision Committee (the Committee) to propose the essential focus of drug informatics.  To explore a future vision about the drug information sciences, it was necessary to collect a variety of opinions widely from researchers.  Therefore, at the 11^th annual meeting of JASDI in July 5-6, 2008, the Committee convened a workshop to extract problems in the researches of drug informatics by using KJ method and evaluated the contents.  The major problems raised were “the field of drug informatics is too broad” and “there is no definition and/or no system of the drug informatics”.  Related problems raised are the shortness of the history and lack of originality in the study.  From different viewpoints, it was also pointed out that the methodology of the research is not well established and no systematic education is provided.  Taken together, major problems in drug informatics are concluded to be the lack of definition and the lack of systematizations, and will be solved to a certain extent by defining the outcome of the researches in drug informatics.