going ballistic? That's a weird characterization of a book you didn't read and which certainly doesn't comport with what I wrote.
My point, where you snipped my words was this: doctors tell me point blank that, unfortunately, they are alloted 15 minutes to see a patient. This doctor pointed out that one reason for the medical establishment's reliance on pills and the ease with which they've been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry is a system of health insurance that punishes physicians for spending more than 10-15 minutes with a patient. As grace loehr pointed out to me, 15 minutes is a luxury. Most physcians are expected to push 6 or more patients through an hour. Colin Brace, an lbo member, has pointed out that it's the same in the netherlands.
Therefore, it is unlikely that the mental disability activists who are working against the 'give 'em a pill' model of medicine are going to get the treatment they need because no one wants to give them psychiatric treatment, which would require attentive ministrations from a psychiatrists. Rather, they are more likely to get a pill which takes ten minutes to dispense. Most of these medications, once thought to be like "insulin for diabetics" (exact quote from marketing lit some years ago) have turned out to be dangerous to patients and to the general public - everything from sleeping pills to medicine used to treat the bogus "active bladder syndrome".
At 02:23 PM 9/16/2012, Wojtek S wrote:
>Shag: "The problem is, they're never going to get help to do anything
>otherwise and get better treatment, unless they do it themselves
>because the medical community is married to the Feed 'em a Pill Model.
>As my doctor told me: "Sorry, I have 15 minutes for you. Let's focus
>on one thing. It's just the way it is. That's why most doctors will
>write a prescription and send you home. I don't like it, but this is
>the way it is."
>
>[WS:] I am not sure what you are trying to argue here - that all
>medicine is crap and we should abandon it?
>
>With due diligence, you can find examples of neglect or abuse in
>virtually every human activity. Medicine and psychiatry are no
>exceptions. But before one starts throwing stones, let us ourselves a
>simple question - taking a big picture pov, what is the balance
>between the number of people helped by modern psychiatry and the
>number harmed by it? The answer is clearly that the former outweigh
>the latter by a significant order of magnitude. For every case of
>misdiagnosis and mistreatment, there are dozens if not hundreds of
>people who really suffer from mental disorders and who benefit, at
>least to some degree, from psychiatric treatment (including
>counseling).
>
>Keep also in mind that most patients expect something from their
>doctors - they do not "there is not much I can do" for an answer.
>That is one of the main reasons why doctors prescribe pills - this is
>what their patients expect. Another main reason is diagnostic
>treatment - the doctors try to diagnose the condition by testing,
>pretty much by trial and error, if it responds to known treatment.
>This is often seen as an alternative to highly invasive procedures,
>such as biopsies. So writing prescriptions is not necessarily a
>symptom of doctors being the pockets of big pharma.
>
>With that in mind, I wonder what is being gained by going ballistic on
>the entire discipline other than creating publicity for one's book.
>--
>Wojtek
>
>"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)