Magic, mystery, smoke, and mirrors. It’s a sight you’d expect from a carnival sideshow, but you need to go no further than your local American university where psilocybin is handed out to “depressed cancer patients” in a ritual that is reminiscent of a new age reenactment of a native American in pursuit of his spirit guide or a poor rendition of Carlos Castaneda embarking on his psychedelic journey of discovery.
It’s a tip of the hat to faith healers, shamans, and witch doctors. It is also a shameful marketing ploy by medically trained professionals that should know better and it is a seriously dangerous red flashing light for the profession and its credibility.
Drugs have become our fallback for almost everything. Practitioners in general are massively guilty of doling them out as a panacea for socially compromised adults. Adults that possess no life skills or coping mechanisms are simply drugged into oblivion. You don’t need to worry about handling life if you’re too stoned to notice it. Forget therapy or actually trying to provide the necessary life skills. Too time-consuming and really, why cure when you create a lifetime of dependence?
Medicine is slipping, quitely, intentionally and unnoticed, into a new sideline.
It is becoming the traveling quack show we so despise, prescribing drugs to treat conditions that mostly don’t exist, conditions some practitioners are unqualified to recognize, let alone prescribe for, and unfortunately, when it comes to those who are trained, the fallback (and sometimes go-to)treatment is the ever lucrative cocktail of mind-altering concoctions we now have at our disposal.
I would go so far as to say that 90% of the patients showing up cap in hand at your door aren’t suffering from any condition your medication could possibly treat, let alone cure. Forget management, if that’s where you’re going. That isn’t an out either. Someone who hasn’t been given the tools or strategies to cope with life doesn’t require medication, they need the school of life and real help to develop mechanisms many of us are already fortunate enough to possess. Medicating these patients is CRIMINAL. It is WRONG. It is UNETHICAL.
I would suggest to our modern-day mental health professionals and doctors alike, that unless you are really gullible or simply follow the flock, that you are aware of the failings in your treatment of these individuals. It’s an easy out, isn’t it? We’ve conditioned the patients to expect the pill. The miracle in the bottle, the panacea that will solve all of life’s problems.
Your patient doesn’t want any other form of help. They simply want the easy route and they’ll sit in front of you and bitch till you get out that pad and start writing. Part of you justifies it with a simplistic thought to ease your conscience. If you don’t prescribe, they’ll simply get it somewhere else. So you cave in. It’s quicker, it’s easier and at least, you think to yourself as you start writing, you can keep an eye on them.
WRONG. STOP. What you are doing is unethical. Is it in the patient’s best interest? Are you properly qualified to make that judgment? Do you understand that you are fundamentally changing the course of the person’s life sitting in front of you. Do you REALLY? Those quick, few lines on that script are potentially going to create a life of addiction and dependency. Was that why you joined the medical profession. For some doctors and many psychiatrists, it clearly seems to be.
Your flashing lights, new age mumbo jumbo, and cutting edge designer drugs are simply complex rituals you’ve designed to cover your snake oil shows. The best interests of the patient ceased being at issue years ago and the danger now, as even universities get involved in the medical mystery tour routine, is that people will start to perceive this as being real medicine. It isn’t and every effort must be made to ensure it never becomes that.
It is a marketing farce, quackery, and pseudoscience wrapped up in what you assume to be a professional presentation to fool the public We see you. We see the lives you are destroying and you better believe we aren’t going to let it go.
It’s time to clean up your sad acts. Revert back to your core principles and HELP the patient, stop helping yourselves. Why Treat when you can Cure? By all means, assist your patients, but do so ethically. Treat them humanely and help them to address the shortcomings in their lives by providing them with lasting skills to cope with their existences. None of this involves any need to get your local pharmacist involved.
You’ll find the rewards from this difficult and lengthy process to be far more rewarding than all the time you currently spend arranging your mirrors and putting on the makeup.
Where are your facts?
Oh, they’re coming. Don’t fret. This is simply a warning shot, fired across the bows, to encourage those with sense to pause, stop, and re-assess their current practices. Most will ignore it, but it may hopefully reach a few professionals. Medika will be publishing a few in-depth articles in the coming weeks on the disgraceful practices that are now becoming almost routine within the mental health community. Medication will feature strongly, as will the tendency to misdiagnose.
To push patients into neatly labeled boxes, each representing a different condition. Boxes that simplify everyone’s life. The patient considers his medication justified, even if the diagnosis of late-onset autism seems a little iffy. The care provider has only to continue handing out the medication and monitoring the patient. A lengthy and sometimes lifelong relationship that benefits no one, other than the practitioner.
Good doctors, ethical doctors, of whom there are many, whose sole purpose is to ensure the health of their patients, are also compromised as trust in the profession is eroded. Patients no longer view the profession with the dewy-eyed trust enjoyed by doctors fifty years ago. No one is more to blame for this than the quacks and charlatans from within the ranks of medicine itself.
That these quacks were, and are still able, in some instances, to pursue their chosen professions, speaks volumes to the lack of proper, swift, and merciless sanction from governing bodies. Lenient approaches from regulatory bodies within certain states encourage the problem and any potential solutions to eradicating this rot from the medical profession have to be undertaken with the full engagement of these bodies.
It must be eradicated. Medicine cannot afford further dilution of the trust it enjoys from the public. The consequences will be devastating, impacting vaccination rates, terminal care, and the inevitable escalating costs of trying to save those who have ventured away from traditional medicine to seek salvation in the hands of the natural healers and fraudsters that permeate the internet.
If we continue to dispense so easily, to medicate without sound reason, then we are in effect digging our own graves. You cannot magic away the problems of two generations of poorly parented adults with a pill. You see doctor, your patients aren’t ill, they are just ill-prepared.
