Is your therapist a little behind the times?

For at least 2,000-years, medicine was locked in a struggle between those who viewed it as an art and those who saw it as a science.

Until the last century, most medical practitioners were guided by intuition and tradition, not by science.

While psychologists certainly do not use such harmful practices, a similar dynamic appears to be at work in clinical psychology today.

Most say that their clinical techniques largely reflect their own insights and experience; they tend not to use the most effective types of treatments available; and they admit to little in the way of scientific training.

For instance, very few clinical psychologists -- about 15 percent -- use what's called exposure therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

There is strong evidence that this treatment is highly effective, but seven in 10 clinicians, according to a recent report in the journal Behaviour Research & Therapy, have not been trained to use it.