Fri, May-04-12, 09:04
|
|
Real food!
Posts: 3,115
|
|
Plan: Lower Carb/IF
Stats: 238/155/140
BF:
Progress: 85%
Location: NorCal
|
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by cpsnow
Is the DSM the psychiatric bible, used by naive practitioners? My professors taught differently. They taught us it is "The Reader's Digest of Psychiatry"
|
I'm glad your professors taught you differently. My experience as someone working in that field, and as a former patient, tell me that the DSM has, for a number of practitioners, morphed into a black and white diagnostic final word as opposed to a simple tool. There are a lot of factors involved. Short assessment visits, pharmaceutical companies pitching to both potential patients and to physicians, human bias, what practitioners are being taught and more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by leemack
I think that the DSM is not to blame but doctors themselves, who, in my experience, often have very little in the way of critical thinking skills. They often have difficulties in seeing past the easy (often incorrect) diagnosis. They suffer with multiple prejudices which all too often affects their clinical judgement. They are mired in dogma and too many either do not look too closely or keep properly updated with advances in medicine and health science. Finally they are too enamoured with pharmaceuticals and the money that comes with them.
The problems that patients are facing now is not limited to the psychiatric field. Most doctors are guilty of these things in all fields, and in 20 years of being both a nurse and a patient, it is only getting worse.
|
I think this is a good assessment. It is certainly an issue that is real (whether it be epidemic or not is not the issue.) And, it does exist in all treatment areas.
Whether the piece has a sensationalist tone to it or not really never was the issue for me. It did point out that an issue exists (and it does.) I stated that I felt the article "has a lot of merit," not that it has no bias or no tone of sensationalism. I would agree that it does have those things, but I wasn't throwing out the baby with the bathwater, either, simply because my experiences from both sides of the fence have shown me that this issue does exist to a large enough extent that I consider it problematic. The reasons for the existence of this issue are numerous, I think. How the DSM is viewed by some practitioners is only one of the reasons.
I also think there are many excellent practitioners. But, that doesn't mean that I'll ignore the issues that exist.
Last edited by Labhrain : Fri, May-04-12 at 09:13.
|