A University of Virginia researcher has helped create an online program that a new study shows helps insomnia sufferers kiss sleepless nights goodbye without sleeping pills.
The program is aptly named Sleep Healthy Using the Internet, or SHUTi, and its goal is to bring the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy to insomnia sufferers who might not have access to trained practitioners.
“The problem is there’s only a handful of people who can actually deliver this,” said researcher Lee Ritterbrand, a psychologist and professor at the UVA School of Medicine. “We wanted to operationalize what we do as clinicians, automate that into a web-based system, and then provide that to end users so they can get the treatment from where ever they’ve got a computer or the internet.”