Posted by Clayton on November 6, 2003, at 15:59:06
In reply to Jagged Little Pill - Today's Practice of Medicine, posted by AnneL on November 5, 2003, at 9:45:53
You are so right. While there have been fantastic advances in neurology, "brain science" and medications, we are still LITTERALLY in the DARK AGES of mental health medicine (in 200 years, I have faith it will be better). I mean leaches and blood-letting. No one has a clue how memory works. More to the point, no one understands the mechanism of action of a single antidepressant (or other psychotropic) used alone in a patient. When multiple psychotropics are prescribed, it's a chemical soup and Russian Roulette with your brain. Read the pharmacology reports or info sheets from your phamacist.
Everyone's health is their own responsibility. So educate the hell out of yourself, use every resource at your disposal to find the best doctor you can and don't hesitate to change if your gut tells you the doc is not right. One sign of a good doc is that they will admit that psychiatry is an art and treatments are based on judgements, intuition and best guesses and that he/she could get it wrong the first time or two. Any doctor who tells you that your prescription is based mostly on scientific understanding is a good doc to abandon. They aren't bad people. They are human. Many committ their live to trying to eliminate suffering and are frustrated when they learn how limited are the assets they can deply to diagnose and treat. Many succumb to believing they can do more than is possible in this era.
So, take personal responsibility for your own medical problems, educate yourself cocerning the problems and possible treatments, use every resource you can to select the best doc, accept that any treatment selected will be a best guess and find a different doctor when your iintuition and brain tell you to do so.
poster:Clayton
thread:273502
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20031105/msgs/277234.html