Posted by baseball55 on May 24, 2014, at 20:01:35
In reply to Re: Marketing of Madness, posted by poser938 on May 24, 2014, at 14:48:53
Psychiatry is not orthopedics. Treating simple bone injuries is one of the few things doctors have known how to do for centuries. Over the last 70 years, they've also figured out how to treat most bacterial infections, some viruses (though few), some heart problems.
Psychiatry isn't much less advanced than oncology. Some cancers are now easily treated, like childhood leukemia. But oncologists are constantly throwing drugs with questionable safety and efficacy at cancers they don't really understand or how to treat. Not only do these drugs cost a fortune (sometimes tens of thousands for a 20% chance at 3 months of additional life), but they often make people's final months a torment.
I don't feel the same disdain for psychiatry that I hear from so many on this list. The drugs have limitations. They have side effects. They often don't work. There are no physical markers for mental illness (i.e., something that would show up on a blood test or scan) and so no obvious way to research antidotes except through trial and error. I have found most of the p-docs I dealt with to be very honest and modest about their abilities to affect a cure. That's been my experience.
What I find mystifying, for someone so hostile to psychiatry, is that you would choose to undergo a treatment (ECT) that is often ineffective, always has severe side effects and whose mechanism of action, when it does work, is a complete mystery.
I will also add that I have encountered many psychiatrists over many hospitalizations and have respected almost all of them. The exception was the doctor who did ECT. I felt that all he cared about was filling his schedule with billable procedures. He seemed completely uninterested in me. I thought he was a real creep.
poster:baseball55
thread:1066021
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140512/msgs/1066065.html