[troutman]

Originally Posted by Flames Draft Watcher

If only everything was an ideal as you make it out to be in medicine. Some Doctors may not think they know everything but the problem lies in the fact that they act as if they do.

This is particularly problematic in the case of prescribing mood-altering drugs for psychiatry. Doctors trust studies done by the drug companies and drugs approved by the FDA. However with the billions involved this process has and continues to be corrupted. In fact drugs being marketed at doctors is a huge conflict of interest. Go look and find how many drugs have been heavily prescribed over the past 50 years which later studies found to be very dangerous. Drugs have been banned which a decade earlier would have been widely prescribed to people with certain mental illnesses. I know there's not a lot of love for the mentally ill so this big issue is not very well known as far as I can tell.

Frankly I find it hard to trust a lot of studies in regards to drugs. And Doctors prescribe these things fairly freely, drugs which may someday be thought of as having severe long term debilitations.

A roomate of mine last summer had been on medications for most of his adult life. I'm not convinced he needed any of them, seemed like he just needed some coping skills and some social skills. At any rate, when he switched psychiatrists his new psychiatrist told him that the combination of anti-psychotics and such that last psychiatrist had prescribed had very dangerous interactions. How confidence inspiring.

Here's part of the wiki entry on antipsychotics...

"A number of harmful and undesired (adverse) effects have been observed, including lowered life expectancy, weight gain, enlarged breasts and milk discharge in men and women (hyperprolactinaemia), lowered white blood cell count (agranulocytosis), involuntary repetitive body movements (tardive dyskinesia), diabetes, an inability to sit still or remain motionless (tardive akathisia), sexual dysfunction, a return of psychosis requiring increasing the dosage due to cells producing more neurochemicals to compensate for the drugs (tardive psychosis), and a potential for permanent chemical dependence leading to psychosis much worse than before treatment began, if the drug dosage is ever lowered or stopped (tardive dysphrenia).
Temporary withdrawal symptoms including insomnia, agitation, psychosis, and motor disorders may occur during dosage reduction of antipsychotics, and can be mistaken for a return of the underlying condition.[1][2]"

Turns out we may have been making people with mental illnesses worse in the past 50 years, not better. But yay medicine right?

In fact the WHO published a report that schizophrenics had a higher chance of a good outcome in their life in a 3rd world country than a 1st world country IIRC.

You really are just supporting my point.

I'm not talking about individual doctors. Science, in the long run, will make corrections. It may be painfully slow to adapt sometimes, but it will progress.

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. - Carl Sagan