That’s the cool thing about medicine, you don’t “do” medicine-- you practice medicine.
And anytime you prescribe a drug, you are starting a trial. Because you really don’t know how it will do to that one patient. Experience may tell you that it should do what you expect it to do, (because it almost always does). But it could only partially work or do nothing, or have varying side affects, or even kill you patient.
As an ER director of a hospital once told me, “Despite all we think we know and all we think we can do for a patient. It still mostly boils down to keeping the patient amused and letting nature take it’s course.”
Or, alternatively, gotta do some excorcism because of the “evil spirits”
The first “real” drug I was on was Cymbalta. As I was leaving the office with my prescription, I noticed a Cymbalta clock on the wall. And then Cymbalta notepads on the counter.
That’s pretty normal for any doctor’s office. There is almost certainly items from other brands all over the back area where the patients don’t go, too. Drug reps go hard on the cheap freebies so the office will always have a reminder that their drug exists. If you ever see someone in the waiting room who is particularly attractive and dressed far nicer than average, that is usually a rep who is there to drop more goodies and shill their drug. As I understand it, it’s a very lucrative job.
Fuck that. They aren’t coming near my office. I even bring my own blank lanyard to medical conferences because i’m not gonna wear one with pharma company logos printed on them.
*US doctor’s office.
Watch Painkiller on Netflix.
That would just make more more depressed than I already am.
May I interest you in some drugs we’re pedalling for a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Peddling.
Pedalling would be for a bicycle and the like.
You sound like you need some grade A designer drugs! There’s nothing like overdosing on synthetic heroin while riding your bike!
Only if I can go on a cruise, too!
Yeah, so is selling drugs or organized crime. Some people have standards…
I had this problem when I was going through some shit (bi-polar) more than a decade ago. My shrink asked me if I could take a medical leave from work to figure out what meds would be the best fit. After initially declining, I accepted that I couldn’t go on and took a medical leave for 90 days (protected in California).
We got me stabilized on fewer meds and my situation drastically improved. My job was still hell, and that eventually broke me, but I would have spun out harder and faster (suicide, I’m pretty sure), without dialing in the meds. Quitting that job was one of the most substantial decisions of my life. (I still attempted suicide later, but that was a product of abandoning treatment, not failure of treatment.)
Treatment can work. It can be hard to get it right. Also, bingo, mother fuckers!
I thought this was a joke, until I saw “Win a cruise.” Then I realized it’s just raising awareness.
Ah thank you, I thought this was about people who needed meds. I understand now
Tldr: then I took Prozac and I was fine.
A while back my usual social anxiety kinda morphed into generalized anxiety disorder and I started having panic attacks, and that was bad of course, and I was in a permanent state of fear of…something/everything. And that was bad too of course.
But the really terrible thing was how after about a year and a half of that constant fear, my sense of reality began to “come unglued”. At the time I remember marveling at how on-the-nose those common phrases turned out to be. Things like “stripped a gear, came unglued, had a screw loose…” felt exactly like what had happened to me.
Absolutely nothing felt “real” or “anchored” or familiar after awhile. I can’t really convey the horror of it or the fear that I would never be able to feel “real” again. My thoughts started turning towards the question of “how can I persist like this? How am I going to keep from having to kill myself?”
Then I started taking a lot of Prozac and I was more or less fine in a few months. So yeah my experience with these drugs has been one of abject salvation. They may not be well understood, which probably leads to the shotgun method, but they’re beautiful in my eyes.
I prescribe a lot of fluoxetine (Prozac). I was always very skeptical about it, but it’s very remarkable. I could ask my med students to guess which patients are on the drug and they could tell. (If someone sees me, they have a good reasons to be anxious)
I know someone that started prozac a few years ago. Completely life changing. She orders coffee by herself now and doesn’t flee a store when someone asks if they can help her.
I’m lucky that my sister already went through the “which drug works?” song and dance. Went to my GP, he prescribed me the same one (sertaline) and a few weeks later started feeling much better (with therapy also playing a part).
I’m deeply offended by the 4x4 bingo card.
Could have easily thrown a free space in there.
Bing card
I remember an old commercial for Abilify:
“Are your current antidepressants not working? Try adding Abilify!”
Then follows the standard minute long rapid-fire list of dangerous side effects. Most of them are “normal”: don’t operate heavy machinery, strange dreams have been reported, beware of suicidal thoughts or actions.
But then there was one last one that stuck with me: “If you experience muscle spasms while taking Abilify, stop taking it at once, because these could become permanent.”
Hooooly fuck. I would seriously consider just getting stoned out of my gourd on expensive cannabis every day if the alternative was that I might have permanent fucking muscle spasms.
Anyway, the state of the pharmaceutical industry is a goddamn nightmare.
Anti psychotics can cause tardive dyskinesia.
Eg, say you are fourteen years old, and your mother doesn’t like that you talk about her smoking pot and forgetting to pick you up from school. So she tells medical professionals that you are violent, skipping school to do drugs, and hallucinating. Teenagers are always liars, so obviously you get slapped with a diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia” (despite schizophrenia being a disease that typically presents in early adulthood). They place you on abilify, then resperdal, than invega. You balloon up fifty pounds and develop a permanent twitch in your right leg, subtle but regular spasms in the hands, and probably permanent damage to your brains ability to regulate its emotions.
Then imagine the same people who did that are still operating a medical facility, and still doing this to children.
Patient suddenly dies
Doctor: … damn it, I didn’t get my straight line
I thought this comic was made by AI for a bit cuz all the words are fake.
and yet the artist still couldn’t come up with 8 more fake SSRI names to make a sensical BINGO card, SMDH
Don’t forget to up the dosage!
We certainly need to end marketing directly to either doctors or patients, but I would like to note to anyone out there struggling that medication can help. Work to develop a relationship with a doctor who works with you and be specific and insistent about what your goals are, but when they suggest medication to help you through the difficult parts of mental illness don’t discount it offhand. Well meaning comments and comics like this kept me away from psychiatrists for years, and that delay cost me a scholarship, a degree, a marriage, and left me with five years of back-breaking labor at a dead-end job. There’s no shame in getting help and medication can play a pivotal role in that.
