doctor disease

Kelley Walker kelley at interpactinc.com
Fri May 11 10:57:19 PDT 2001


At 11:36 AM 5/11/01 -0400, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>At 08:54 AM 5/11/01 -0800, marta wrote:
> >I disagree. Drugs prescribed in combination with others can produce
> >extreme adverse reactions and personally I've heard of this happening
> >when the doctor did not bother to check the complete patient history.
> >Hell some don't even have a form for a patient to write the drugs down
> >that they are currently taking.
> >Then there is overprescribing and not doing proper blood tests to see
> >if there is liver and other damage happening (a signal to get the
> >person off the drug).
>
>
>Thank your local HMO or insurance company for that. It is them who say
>what doctors can or cannot do. medication is often seen as a more
>economically 'viable' alternative to inpatient treatment (esp. in case of
>mental disorders).

this is simply not true. my mother's a nurse. she was in training over 13 years ago. while she was, she got very interested in the above phenom--many women are given pills to cure them. valium was the big problem way before prozac, and that was the 70s. i don't have at my finger tips all the research, but there is plenty of it, about how doctors don't get one lick of training in what drugs do to your body. as i recall, my mother told me that they get one course in med school. the specialization of medical practice and the attendant problems re prescibing drug therapies is well-known.

in fact, as i recall, at my mother's graduation from school for her B.N., the head nurse spoke about the ways in which the nurse's association had been dealing with these very problems. the professionalization of nursing was a movement to raise their wages (it worked! but it reproduced the hierarchies _within_ nursing) and to pick up the slack. that is, since doctor's were failing to take the whole person into account when treating them, then it was the nurse's job-- and this was defined as part of the _profession_ of nursing.

for my budding sociological self, it was a fascinating little graduation speech, i must say.

the problem that marta mentions is well-known IN medical practice itself.

kelley



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