Solving the "opioid crisis"

Sometimes they experience serious life altering or life threatening side effects. There were at least a few dozen people I encountered in time there whose lives were literally saved by stopping their meds.
Sure, when you're talking about the older class of anti-psycotics, like Perphenazine, Haloperidol, etc. Or Mono-Amine Oxidase Inhibitors (anti-depressants) like Nardil. Then yeah, there are serious complications associated with them. But the newer classes of atypical anti-psychotics have fewer dangerous side effects than the older typical ones (with the significant exception of Clozapine). There are dangerous side effects in almost every drug's profile (including penicillin), but in most of the new atypicals, they are reduced or not as lethal under proper dosage regimens. There still are risks, however. Suicidal thoughts and tendencies are a big red flag, but you get those from anti-depressants too. If you discount the suicide and diabetes risks (there is a marginal possibility of a patient developing type II diabetes in a few of the new drugs), the new atypicals are surprisingly effective at treating a difficult and life destroying set of afflictions. Even Tardive Dyskenesia (involuntary movements which are chronic and caused by long term anti-psychotic use) is not the problem that it once was.

There have been patients in my career which have reacted badly to anti-psychotics and were better off without them, yes. However, their illness was left untreated, or untreatable. They were institutionalized for their entire lives. What kind of life is that? Yes, stopping the meds might have saved their lives, but only to live in misery. The families of patients only hear that the patient is reacting badly and pull them off all meds, when something else could be tried. It may be true in your experience that their lives were saved, but don't make it sound like medication is a big boogey-man, and that all psychiatric medications cause suffering and harm, because they don't. There are trade offs, yes, but it isn't necessary to get a mob with pitchforks going about the issue, either.
 
What I meant by "mood enhancers" was in fact "mood enhancers." In the US there are plenty of people who are prescribed these things without any serious mental illness diagnosis. Frequently the "mood enhancer" is prescribed because people don't feel quite right when their blood pressure meds or other permanent prescription starts affecting their sense of well being.

How dare people receive medical help when they feel terrible

As for people with "lifelong needs for treatment," it isn't them that are failures, it's the treatment.

>be American
>have diabetes
>take insulin shots
>still have diabetes 1 week later
>THIS “MEDICINE” DIDNT EVEN CURE ME ITS NEW WORLD ORDER MIND CONTROL
 
This is a pretty weak conspiracy theory and an even weaker naturalistic fallacy.

It doesn't take any conspiracy. Give a boy a hammer and most problems appear to be solvable with a good pounding. Give a doctor the responsibility to "make everyone better" and a supply of chemicals, most problems appear to be solvable with a prescription pad.
 
You know GPs don't just prescribe medications, right? They're also where one gets referrals to psychologists, councillors, dieticians, sleep clinicians, physiotherapists, etc. And to all kinds of testing. There's no obvious reason why, absent a commission system or something (which would be extremely illegal), GPs as a whole should be leaning more heavily towards inappropriate medication prescriptions than other forms of treatment.

I'm just not sure what the incentive would be in a publicly funded system with a subsidised monopsony government medication buyer. There's certainly a government incentive to train doctors NOT to overprescribe, since the government foots most of the bill. I can also imagine an incentive to over-refer to friends and colleagues in specialty practice. But not so much for GPs over-prescribing medications.

If a GP is just writing prescriptions for everyone without listening and trying to diagnose and without trying to refer people appropriately then they're not very good. (Don't get me wrong, there's a place for 5- minute appointment doctors who just write work absence notes but you shouldn't go to one like that with any real problem.)

Also in our personal experience the bigger problem is plenty of GPs are not taking mental health seriously enough and don't have sufficient training in the field. Especially with older doctors, and especially male ones, it was a dice roll with each new one whether they'd just go "eat better and do exercise" or actually have an interest in, and understating of, the issues.
 
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In the US system, first off, pharmaceutical companies reward doctors directly for prescribing their products. Also in the US system there is incentive for the GP to submit referrals for any and all consults that the patient's insurance will bear, with a follow up and billable office visit with the GP to go over the results of the consult.
 
Yeah you'll never catch me arguing that US healthcare access isn't broken. Just making the point that statistics about widespread mental health issues come from outside there and one can't attribute it to US profit motive.
 
Oh, I have no doubt that the average Joe is a major component of the problem, because of exactly the quote I posted earlier. Good health is hard work, and in the US hard work, as a solution, is completely off the table for most people. But, no, I'm not contributing to any research into bottled solutions either, because I do recognize that the problem has already been solved. The fact that USians desperately want good health to be something they can just find a doctor and buy doesn't mean I have any interest in making it so.

1% of the population has schizophrenia, and let me assure you that it's being handled very poorly. You aren't my target audience when I suggest that people literally donate, we already butted heads on this, and you wouldn't.

But enough people already don't donate, this means that the marginal benefit of any individual does choose to donate is very large. I literally ask for one hour per month on a consistent basis, intentionally.
 
In the US system, first off, pharmaceutical companies reward doctors directly for prescribing their products. Also in the US system there is incentive for the GP to submit referrals for any and all consults that the patient's insurance will bear, with a follow up and billable office visit with the GP to go over the results of the consult.

This has nothing to do with funding a research charity out of your own dollars, or fighting the good fight on fixing the American system regarding generics. You are typing paragraphs complaining about a system that we all know is as broken. This is why I suggest people take actual proactive efforts to improve things.
 
1% of the population has schizophrenia, and let me assure you that it's being handled very poorly. You aren't my target audience when I suggest that people literally donate, we already butted heads on this, and you wouldn't.

But enough people already don't donate, this means that the marginal benefit of any individual does choose to donate is very large. I literally ask for one hour per month on a consistent basis, intentionally.

Does that 1% include schizotypal disorder or is that additional?
 
If I remember my statistics correctly, the 1% only includes true schizophrenics of whichever overall type (paranoid, hebephrenic, etc). It does not include other schizoid disorders such as Schizo-Affective Disorder, for instance.
 
1% of the population has schizophrenia, and let me assure you that it's being handled very poorly. You aren't my target audience when I suggest that people literally donate, we already butted heads on this, and you wouldn't.

But enough people already don't donate, this means that the marginal benefit of any individual does choose to donate is very large. I literally ask for one hour per month on a consistent basis, intentionally.

That wasn't butting heads, that was respectfully declining.
 
I don't trust Wikipedia as a source. Sorry.
 
It actually is a serious problem, and there needs to be accountability for it at every level.

Drug companies pushing it is questionable, but so is the regulation, prescription rate, insurance coverage for it, and some responsibility on the addicts themselves (last one is situational but there are plenty of addicts who didn't get there by accident or without choice). "Maintenance" opioids should be a pretty darned rare thing. They're not bad when used in indicated situations.

The most obvious way to cut down on addiction is to stop taking the addictive substance for long enough. There will be black market stuff going on but screw those people, if you don't subsidize that problem the numerical size of the problem goes down quite a bit.
 
1% of everyone on Earth has schizophrenia? 70 million people?

Like I said, it was a loose statistic. It's usually presented as '1%', because it's discussing the cohort that's affected (mainly young adults). It's under-represented at older ages, heavily due to either natural recovery or early death. It's under-represented at younger ages, since it's mostly a post-puberty disease.

But it's a big effing deal. Most people will know someone (or two) lost to schizophrenia, where they spiral out and then become a memory of your life. It's vastly under-supported on the charity front, and we terrifically underspend, intentionally so.

What I like to point out is that it's merely a sample of the category of 'mental illness'. It's not like money spent on schizophrenia will only help schizophrenics. Due to the fact that biology is actually holistic, research on one aspect of the brain will benefit other research that is targeting other concerns with people's mental health. So, schizophrenia is merely a snapshot.

But it's my most obvious indication that people actually literally choose not to give a crap. Not enough to do anything. Oh, I can get some hand-wringing if I can keep your attention, but that's about it. It is so terrifically underfunded that literally an intentional effort to donate makes a real difference.

I forget my numbers, but the spending is pathetic. It's something like $1 per year per worker. On something that costs us one percent of our young adult population. The $16 per month (intentional), or whatever, is such a scale-order difference in effort, it cannot be described. Keep in mind, Big Pharma doesn't really invest here. And we tend to slot treatment into the terrible mix of prison and hospital. Mental health is probably one of our greatest opportunities in the 21st century for the developed nations.

But, hand-wringing, maybe. That's it.
 
And we tend to slot treatment into the terrible mix of prison and hospital. Mental health is probably one of our greatest opportunities in the 21st century for the developed nations.

I wonder how long until it starts seeing serious and consistent weaponizing in terms of power posturing, rather than just the occasional use it gets right now.
 
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