Substitutions

I follow food and nutrition science to some extent.  This caught my attention:

It’s been a profitable venture for the drug companies, as well as for the professors and their universities. Agriculture schools increasingly depend on the industry for research grants, a sizable portion of which cover overhead and administrative costs. And many professors now add to their personal bank accounts by working for the companies as consultants and speakers. More than two-thirds of animal scientists reported in a 2005 survey that they had received money from industry in the previous five years.

Yet unlike a growing number of medical schools around the country, where administrators have recently tightened rules to better police their faculty’s ties to pharmaceutical companies, the schools of agriculture have largely rejected critics’ concerns about industry cash. Administrators have set few limits on how much corporate money agricultural professors can accept. Faculty work with industry is governed by confidentiality rules that veil it from public view.

In certain ways, the close relationship between animal scientists and pharmaceutical companies has never served the public well. Few animal scientists have been interested in looking at what harm the livestock drugs may be causing to the cattle, the environment, or the people eating the meat. They’ve left most of that work to scientists outside of agriculture, consumer groups, and others who take interest.

But with the introduction of Zilmax, the situation may have reached a tipping point. Critics say some academic animal scientists have become so closely tied to the drug companies that they may be working more in the companies’ interests than in those of farmers and ranchers—the very groups that land-grant universities were created to serve.

Substitute patient for beef cattle and psychiatrist/primary care physician for animal scientist and voila! Patients growing enormous and iatrogenically ill and diseased on second generation antipsychotics, and their physicians so entangled with pharma and medical device industries that they fail to serve patients’ interests.

The Chronicle of Higher Education isn’t usually where I find in depth whistle-blower investigative reporting.  Read the entire article.  It will (or should) make your hair stand on end.

Ethics and malfeasance, anyone?

Social contract. In pieces.

Related articles

• Scientists Deeply Skeptical of FDA Program to Reduce Antibiotic Use in Agriculture (ecowatch.org)
• US agency seeks voluntary restrictions on animal antibiotics (blogs.nature.com)
• Drug companies paid $6.3 million to Oklahoma’s doctors for research, speaking (newsok.com)
• Pharmaceutical company taps Novartis and Pfizer for management team (medcitynews.com)
• FDA urges limited use of antibiotics on farms (amarillo.com)
• How do you solve a problem like agriculture? (boingboing.net)
• Girard Gaul- Research Paper-Rough Draft (envirowriters.wordpress.com)

Letters to Children and Other Juveniles

A little while ago, I dropped in at one of the many libraries in the area that sell books and ephemera.  A nondescript thin unmarked cover demanded closer inspection. In muted gold script, the title emerged, Letters to Children by Beatrix Potter, Harvard University Press.

Inside were several otherwise unpublished tales embedded in very kind and respectful letters to children that Potter had written.  Like another favorite author, Madeleine L’Engle, she was careful to get out of her own way and write of salience and thought-provoking ethics which all ages could enjoy and take away the gifts of essence.

It occurred to me that the ever louder and defensive whining tales of woe coming from self-proclaimed “good” psychiatrists might benefit from a session or two with Potter’s and L’Engle’s stories.

Here are some of the take aways for them:

1. Who is the subject of the tale?  Patients (others) or self (psychiatry and psychiatrists)

2. Who is the hero? See #1

3. Who and what constitutes the villain?  Patients, insurers, third party reimbursers, employers (hospitals, institutions, jails, prisons, lawyers, universities, patients), laws, regulations, society, colleagues, non-psychiatrists health professionals

4. What needs to happen for the hero to triumph? Patient compliance, better financial renumeration, more professional power, greater professional autonomy, more prestige (all this assumes psychiatry is the hero)?  Or in the case of patient as hero, recovery, respect, successful societal integration, independence, personal autonomy, belonging, self-efficacy, prestige, greater financial renumeration?

5. What are the dangers interfering with hero triumph? What are the resources the hero brings to bear on the dangers?

OK, so with that in mind, have fun re-reading your childhood favorites.  And take a gander at two recent posts penned by psychiatrists who define themselves as “good guys”, but do not specify exactly what that means for readers. The Steve twins – Drs. Moffic and Balt, have a go and try to engage with commenters who self identify primarily as people who had experiences as psychiatric patients and family of psychiatric patients. Refer to the list above and see if you can’t help them out in their obvious confusion and self-contradictions.

Hint: psychiatry’s subject is supposed to be patient well-being and health derived from a respectful and trust-based relationship with patients

 

Riffing off A Powerful Message

A week’s worth of (medicated) sleep, and my noggin can at least process a few thoughts, here and there. 1 boring old man published an important post titled, A Powerful Message.  He chronicled the increasing clamor of psychiatry to use a neural circuitry model as evidence of psychopathologic causality and therefore an avenue for research and treatment.  I had noticed this, too, with increasing alarm and a sense of deja vu. I yammered a bit in a comment:

As a long time critical care nurse and educator, I witnessed an enormous transition in thinking about the care and treatment of myocardial infarctions (heart attacks). Care and treatment initially and historically was focused on complete bed rest and inactivity – up to and including only allowing room temperature food and drink lest cold irritate the vagus nerve. As the plumbing and electrical circuitry interface with the muscle stimulation and perfusion became more well known, treatments became more aggressive – getting patients up and moving right away, reperfusing coronary arteries and stenting them, ablating lesions, etc. Then the focus spotlighted statin use for prevention, concomitant with pharma DTC advertising and KOLs. Only recently has any of this been questioned, and lo and behold, stenting and preventive statin use may not do anything at all in terms of disease prevention.

Not for nuthin’ has clinical depression been found to coexist and correlate with heightened morbidity and mortality with of heart disease.

Patient stays in critical care units for heart attacks (MIs) went from 7-10 days to 1-2. Of course, patient education, diet teaching, stress management, socioeconomic assessment went out the window. In other words, self management and quality of life factors were ignored and abandoned. Patients are sent home with prescriptions, stents, pacemakers, automatic internal defibrillators and all manner of coronary hardware, and sometimes followup appointments. They are not linked to case managers, community resources and psychosocial supports.

The forces of capitalism, free markets and decreasing corporate regulation have converged to erode worker protections, environmental protections, food safety, community development (corporations receiving tax breaks, outsourcing jobs to other countries and pulling up stakes, leaving communities dying on the vine), and overall, contributing to the deterioration of social life and community throughout the US.  Vicious and poisonous politics have contaminated the well of civil discourse.

Whither health and well-being?

Here, my collegiate roots show.  Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and the Department of Nursing Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, both were founded on the critically important work of nurses who established, grew, and nurtured public health and psychiatric nursing theory and practice.  My education was based on the principles and practices of Lillian Wald, Hildegard Peplau, Virginia Henderson, Isabel Hampton Robb (yes, the Robbs of Johns Hopkins and later, Lakeside Hospital of Case Western Reserve – this hospital was noted by Flexner in his famous Report on Medical Education, for serving as an exemplar), and Mary Adams, pioneer in gerontologic nursing and later a Dean at her home state, South Dakota’s State University School of Nursing.  These names will mean nothing to almost all members of the public, physicians, and sorry to say, nurses.

But I hope you’ll click on the links because their work has critical importance and influence on the individual, family and community health and well-being of Americans today. What you will see is their universal concern with the immediate and larger social and community environments which affect health and well-being of the targeted patient populations.

Physicians, nurses and indeed, all members of the (licensed, ergo, regulated) helping professions have an obligation to address, influence and lead policy and programming which are congruent with and supportive of a healthy environment and social life.  Those include wages which allow adults to work a single job and provide for safe shelter, clean water and air, nutritious fresh whole foods, reliable transportation, access to education and natural recreational facilities and adequate protective clothing for themselves and dependents.  It means assuring clean air and potable water.  It means assuring access for all to basic communicable disease prevention: vaccines, safe food, zoonoses prevention.  It means worker protections which promote tolerable physical and psychological stress levels.  It means protections for whistleblowers – rewarding workers for upholding ethical business, research and professional ethics.  It means promoting civil discourse and discouraging ostracism – whether that be racism, bullying, intimidation or any other type of behavior which is exclusionary.

Embracing the classical virtues and publicly upholding the inherent worth of every person will lead more to health and well-being than any pill, potion, invasive treatment or state of the art assessment tool.

The bottom line:  Each and every member of a helping profession by the social contract is an agent for social change.  Without that, patient treatment is devoid of care. And treatment will only palliate and blunt symptoms, rather than address disease and distress causality. Futile, impotent and, ultimately, destructive. Like this, perhaps:

Cui bono?

I haven’t blogged about meta psychiatry much.  If you are following the unfolding DSM debacle, you may well see the demise of extant US psychiatry (take it away, 1 boring old man). As I responded to Steve Balt’s weasel words excuse-filled post, I believe that psychiatry has broken the social contract. UPDATE: Steve deleted my response and apparently banned me from commenting. In a perverse way, I’m pleased because it validates what I am writing here.)  It deserves to have limits placed on it via licensure restrictions and practice proscriptions. It should be demoted to technician helper status, and it should no longer be viewed as having the right to call itself a medical specialty.  Indeed, psychiatrists should be mandated to practice as physician’s assistants – under the direct supervision and accountability by a physician.

US psychiatry is having a Flexner Report (pdf, but well worth the hassle) moment, and here’s hoping that a modern day Flexner – or committee – will appear, free of conflicts of interest (snort), and raring to delve into every psychiatry department of every medical school, academic medical center and private and public psychiatric facility.

The key question here is who benefits?  In the case of the licensed helping professions, the underlying ethic historically has been that the patient’s interests are first and foremost, and that the helping relationship is one of beneficence.

Well, let’s see:

Are there clear standards of practice and care in psychiatry?

Beyond that of assessment of “symptoms” and socially defined unacceptable and undesirable behaviors (dangerousness, aggression, agitation), and establishing a therapeutic alliance, no there are not.  You will not find any Cochrane meta analyses of psychiatric care demonstrating efficacy, patient cure or higher quality of life, effective palliation or patient satisfaction. There are no medical diagnoses which fall under psychiatry.  Bunches of symptoms labelled arbitrarily with “disorder”, but no biologically-based pathophysiology.  That falls under neurology, or as manifestations of symptoms of endocrine, cardiac and infectious diseases.

What are the drivers of psychiatry?

Sources of reimbursement demand patient diagnoses, even if there is no “disorder” present.  The absence of a pathologic diagnosis means that the psychiatrist will not be paid by a third party.  Ergo, the patient becomes the means to the psychiatrist’s ends. Stigma?  What the hell do they care? Well, actually, distress from stigma is a source of their business.

Practice and professional autonomy.  No one can tell the psychiatrist how to practice.  Indeed, the literature is filled with admonitions for psychiatrists to use their “informed intuition” and “professional judgment.”  There is no difference between this and the practice of quackery.  None.  It’s based on nothing scientific, reproducible and ethical.  Moreover, in using intentionally flowery and obscure terms such as psychoeducation and psychopharmacology, psychiatrists try to make patient education and medication prescription something mysterious, specialized and requiring advanced knowledge and practice. That is deceptive, inaccurate and serves only the psychiatrist’s interests in perpetuating a sham specialty.

How does extant US psychiatry practice benefit patients?

It doesn’t. Patients present seeking help for distressing symptoms – feelings, emotions, perceptions, thinking and behavior which interferes with their perceived quality of life. Alternatively, they present involuntarily when law enforcement becomes involved.

The therapeutic alliance is a dishonest relationship which is presented as one of equals, partnering to address distressing symptoms.  In reality, it is a sham cover for the psychiatrist to retain control and power and to coerce the patient into compliance with the psychiatrist’s ordered treatment.  Many, if not most, medications used by psychiatrists cause iatrogenic harm – up to and including death.  Patients are not routinely warned about these, and so cannot and do not make informed decisions about taking them.  The adverse effects of them are the most common reasons that patients stop taking them, which is entirely their right.

Psychiatric hospital facilities are prisons.  There is no therapeutic benefit to patients.  The routines used in them are designed to maintain power and control over patients by staff, to facilitate custodial functions (eating, hygiene, activity), and to intrusively observe patients/inmates.  Most deny inmates access to fresh air, direct sunlight and nature.  Diets are non-nutritive. Patients are denied visitors, their dignity, and their civil rights.

Most of all, the psychiatrist/patient relationship is judgmental, dehumanizing and designed to keep the patient under the psychiatrist’s “care” on a chronic basis.  The emphasis is on continuity, not cure.

Everything about this is unethical, unprofessional and wrong.

Why write about it here?

People who suffer with suicidality need a place of absolute safety to discuss their feelings of unbearable distress.  They need to be able to speak with someone who is knowledgeable about the distressors and their causes, tolerates having someone else share this distress, and has the capability and professional experience to support and coach them to lower their level of distress to the point that they can then address alleviating the underlying causes.

Patients need to be equal partners in the relationship, and their needs, wants, desires and functional goals should be paramount within the constraints of civil society. (Psychiatry is alone in hosting a forensic subspecialty and working for law enforcement agencies [prisons and jails] as well as serving as for-profit expert witnesses in court trials.)  There should never be a threat of law enforcement involvement as a condition of care.  There should be no threat of involuntary incarceration – forget about calling it hospitalization – it’s no such thing.

In the Reading List, I’ve included some programs and interventions which do this.  But to date, I’ve not found a single licensed provider of any sort who has the above skill set and practices by the stated objectives. And while support groups can be helpful in long term coping and adaptation, I think that acutely distressed people deserve to have competent, capable and non-coercive, humane care.

That care is decidedly not to be found within extant US psychiatry.