Psychological treatments for irritable bowel syndrome: a critique of controlled treatment trials.

We aimed to determine the efficacy of psychological treatments in irritable bowel syndrome.A systematic review of the literature on psychological treatments of IBS was performed using Medline (1966-1994) and Psychlit (1974-1994) and secondary references. Fully published studies in English were selected if they compared any type of "psychological" treatment of irritable bowel syndrome with a control group. Studies without any comparable control...