Quote:
Originally Posted by JaneB
Do your professors in med school tell you to give a patient a pill for every ache or issue? Just wondering since that is what every doctor does these days. Studies are not always accurate and we live in a world where SSRI's are taken like candy.  |
Quite the opposite, actually.
Few physicians support prescriptions for "every ache and issue". Overprescription is generally seen as a very bad thing - especially in the case of antibiotics, where it has become an actual danger to public health by creating resistant strains of bacteria.
With SSRIs specifically, there is the problem that a patient who believes he needs a specific drug (because of drug advertising or word of mouth) may overstate or (unintentionally) misrepresent symptoms. It's a problem that is exacerbated by people googling specific disorders, since people may think "yeah, I might have this" when reading about symptoms of those disorders, even if they didn't consider the "symptoms" they have to be a problem beforehand.
That creates some major diagnostical problems, since with mood and personality disorders, what the patient tells forms the basis for the diagnosis. And if the patient has already focused on what he (unconsciously) considers to be "relevant" and "important", it distorts the diagnostic process. Personally, I think it quite likely that merely reading the Wikipedia entry for "major depressive disorder" by a patient increases chances of a diagnosis of major depressive disorder in that patient by a significant margin.
Perhaps an even better example would be Oprah. Have Oprah do an item on a disorder with somewhat vague symptoms and an extremely low rate of occurrence, and you'll inevitably see many thousands of people visiting their GP with symptoms exactly matching that disorder. (it would make for an interesting experiment: have Oprah do an item on a non-existent disorder, maybe with certain mutually exclusive symptoms, and see how many people come to their GP thinking they have it)