Posted by ayuda on March 23, 2003, at 20:35:03
In reply to Lou's response to ayuda's post-4 » ayuda, posted by Lou Pilder on March 23, 2003, at 14:46:34
> ayuda,
> You wrote,[...Dr. Bob's research here will probably be very helpful to the psychiatric community as a whole...].
> Could you expound on one of the research aspects that you see here that you think will be helpfull to the psychiatric community? If you could, then I feel that that would be a topic that could be helpfull for this board to innitiate a discussion about.
> LouMost psychiatrists only know how their own patients are responding to meds, or they have to wait until studies are done, and then there's the debate that studies are slanted if they are done by the pharmaceutical company, or if they are done by another entity with its own interests, etc. So, even though this is not a perfect form of research by far, at least Dr. Bob is getting to see patients he would not normally come into contact with (nor who would normally come into contact with each other) debating amongst themselves concerning the efficacy of their treatments.
We get to talk about the side effects and how we feel about them. For instance, a side effect could be listed on the med info as sexual dysfunction. What form does that really take? How do patients rate that side effect as far as whether or not they will stay on that med due to it? How important to a patient (and is there a difference between male and female) is this med that they are willing to live with this side effect? Those are things that a psychiatrist may know from their individual patients, or that a patient may have an opinion about, but Dr. Bob learns how people are handling them, what advice they have for each other, how many people agree or disagree with the "self" help, etc.
So in this respect, he is learning a lot more than, say my own doctor, who only knows either what his patients say as individuals, or what the published tests show. So I think that Dr. Bob is getting to the human side of these treatments through this board.
There are drawbacks -- this is not exactly a "control" group. People have to find this site, it doesn't come to them, and so you have to be interested in "talking" with strangers over the internet -- and have internet access in the first place. And you have to be literate -- which may sound dumb, but this board automatically leaves out illiterate people. There are many reasons why this isn't an exact science, getting people's stories from them (historians experience much the same problems when they take oral histories, which I could explain more in detail at some other time). As many of us admit, we have our good days and our bad days posting to this board. But all in all, I think that the interaction that we all have with each other concerning our treatments and how we interact with each other is something that psychiatrists usually only get in group therapy, and then only their own patients. So I think this idea of strangers who are only brought together through their interest in helping each other through this board -- or in letting out how they feel about their treatment through this board -- is fairly interesting.
poster:ayuda
thread:201678
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20030221/msgs/211958.html