May 18, 2007
For anyone attempting to make an appointment with a Healthcare Provider, fill a prescription or simply find out what ails them, the labyrinth of rules, exceptions and co-pays can be overwhelming.
It is bad enough to be restricted to providers in the Network controlled by ones health plan. But it is even worse when the provider one has to settle for cannot recall details from the initial consultation, the original complaint or directions given between consultation and follow-up. Moreover, he/she is likely to be more concerned with co-payments in cash, handing out samples of recently launched pharmaceutical cures – which if all goes well he/she will prescribe - and how many more patients he/she can fit into the waiting room before tempers flare. More often than not, the patient is merely a statistic, a guinea pig, a potential lifetime user of pharmaceutical products.
If a healthcare provider is so busy that the patient’s health is worth only three minutes of valuable $300 per hour time, then there is a serious problem. Doctors have hundreds of patients. Patients have only one life to live.
This reality is especially stark in the field of mental health, which, with its already scarlet stigmata, is terrifying enough for most patients. But to have a so-called mental health expert diagnose a patient in less than five minutes, and then not even review the data on follow-up visits, is a serious breach of the trust so essential for effective patient care. For patients, the dismissive and often arrogant demeanors of the drug-prescribing psychiatric set, has the potential to cause the patient serious harm. If the doctor has no time or interest in the life of the patient, what does that tell the patient?
It is not merely the drug prescribed that has an effect on the patient – it is the entire mental healthcare experience that informs the patient.
The dispensing of drugs, particularly those elicited by an intimate relationship between doctors and pharma, has no apparent end. There is simply too much money to be made. The Healthcare and Pharmaceutical industries make enormous profits, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying, and hold the patients hostage.
My own personal story has taken me down a very frustrating road. Since my unfortunate incarceration in a psych ward, I have been diagnosed as mildly depressed, severely depressed, mildly bipolar, unipolar and so on. I have been told I will need medication for life, for a year, or maybe not at all. I have been told, “my office is very busy; I can’t guarantee there will be interruptions,” and “if you miss any appointments we will bill you anyway”, and my personal favorite “just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’”, when asked questions of a complex nature that can never be answered “yes” or “no”.
Attempting to commune with a doctor about mental illness, considering psychopharmalogical treatment, which affects the brain and therefore the very seat of perception, individuality, hopes and dreams, is not the same as having a bunion. Yet the podiatrist is much more likely to show concern, listen to questions and answers and to spend more than three minutes with a patient. It is not surprising to me that a patient, after being roughly handled by a mental health professional, will never return again, will go off medication, will take matter into his/her own hands.
This is a shameful situation. There is no excuse for the psychiatrist to put him/herself in such an elevated position that he/she can evaluate, prescribe and predict in five minutes or less. Surely, he /she spends more time planning that night’s dinner than in making a decision that will have a direct impact upon a patient perhaps for that patient’s life. Shameful.
I ask myself: Would my cousin have committed suicide if a mental health professional had had more than five minutes to diagnosis him?
Tags:
healthcare providers, mental health, pharma, psychiatric care, psychiatrists, suicide, US Healthcare
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Posted on 5/18/2007
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