I want to tell you all something I learned from my top notched psychiatrist that I live to far away

[Maraya1969]

from to go to anymore. After my brain was taken care of we would often talk and he would tell me things about medications and things that go on in the psychiatric world.

A couple things I learned from him.

Most psychiatrists are not psycho-pharmacologists meaning they are int intensively trained and are treating on the cutting edge of psychiatry. He has a test for patients to give to their doctor's posted on the internet, (he was on the net as soon as there was a net) if they dare, and it contains questions like, "would you ever prescribe a MAO inhibitor with a Tricyclic medication, Would you ever prescribe more than 80 mg of Prosac at a time?

And the answers were all yes and he said that the average psychiatrist would say, "NO", it is too dangerous.

I took an MAO inhibitor years ago before Prozac came out and you have to be on a special diet to take it. If you take certain foods you can have a very dangerous spike in your blood pressure and it could be deadly. But I was cheating and getting away with it and I told him. So his solution was to give me the antidote to carry around with me all the time. I doubt other doctors would think of such a thing. And it came in handy because I ate a swiss cheese sandwich once and all of a sudden my head was pounding and I knew I was having a reaction. But I remembered his directions: Bite down on one capsule and swallow the other and get to the hospital. When I got to the hospital my blood pressure was not that bad.

I'm saying this because since I have moved to Florida I have never had anything like the competent treatment he gave me and recently was a VICTIM of a young doctor that took over the large place I go to. (I don't even see a doctor now, I see a PA but mostly that is OK because I am stabilized and have been for years) She decided that every single patient in the place was to come off their benzodiazepines and use them on an "as needed basis" only.

I have been on benzodiazepines for 30 years! Withdrawals are horrific and they are very useful for a panic disorder which I have. I don't abuse them and I believe most people on them do not abuse them. But they are known as a pill that you can buy on the street and people do abuse them, (so of course every one of her patients MUST STOP THIS!)

So I created a ruckus and called after hours and bitched to the answering people and got the doctor to have a meeting with me and the PA, (who agreed with me that the doctor was being ridicules.) Well I think that young doctor felt like she had been through a heavy weight boxing match after we had done and she lost big time. I pulled out everything I had been taught, everything I learned over the years and my own personal experience. The end result is I am staying on my benzodiazepines and she can suck it. (and my PA who did not agree with her gave me a "thumbs up" when the doctor was not looking)

Also I wanted to make known that I know many people in the mental health field as patients. And one of the things I notice about them which I have also read is they stay in depression for years even while being treated. Usually a low grade depression that they just live with. And their doctors keep them on the same medications!!!! I think that is a travesty. That is like giving a cancer patient a drug that doesn't work and keeping them on it when there are other ones to try.

Not only do they put people on the wrong drugs and leave them there they often do not prescribe enough of the drug to see if it will work. I can't tell you how many patients I have spoken with who are still depressed but on less than the highest recommended dose of the anti-depressant they are on.

I'm not sure I should be posting this here but I think it is a good thing to know about the field of psychiatric treatment. I'll cross post it to the help forum

[hunter]

1. I think this is a good place to post this. Thanks.

This is a huge problem in all of U.S. medicine. Patients have to fight for what they need at the very times they are least able to fight. It is especially true in mental health or pain management. People are often left in chronic states of dysfunctionality lasting years.

God knows I've been fortunate to have strong advocates when I've been in my deepest, darkest places.

In a perfect world a doctor would be a patient's strongest advocate. But there are many things standing in the way. We have a health insurance industry that will only pay for "assembly line medicine" and automatically deny any unusual claims. We have an idiotic "War on Drugs" which leaves many doctors reluctant to prescribe certain medicines that are very effective but commonly abused, and turns a few bad-apple doctors into true criminals selling prescriptions to anyone and everyone who can afford their fee. And in a perfect world pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be pushing their most profitable drugs, they would instead be quietly manufacturing and selling the best, most effective drugs, not $5-a-pill replacements for more effective five-cent-a-pill generics.

If we established a single-payer medical system, removed the insurance companies from the process, and treated drug addiction as a public health problem not a crime, then maybe then more doctors would see themselves as their patients' strongest advocates and not as overburdened assembly line workers, pill sales people, or potential targets of Big Brother's War on Drugs SWAT teams.

[elleng]

2. Thanks, Maraya. Good info.

My GP referred me to one of the specialists to which you refer, psycho-pharmacologist, years ago. Whatever I took worked, that is, helped make my life tolerable, until I actually recognized the cause of my depression, with the help of a friend, my attorney, and I was able to stop taking whatever it was (forget now) cold-turkey. Much to my surprise, I had no problems after doing so.