No time to talk, heres a prescription.
August 6, 2008 9:46 pm Antidepressants, Antipsychotic, Big Pharma, Fraud, News, Psychiatrist, PsychiatryCartoons about the psychiatrist’s couch were recently the subject of a museum exhibition. Now, the couch itself may be headed for a museum.
A new study finds a significant decline in psychotherapy practiced by U.S. psychiatrists.
The expanded use of pills and insurance policies that favor short office visits are among the reasons, said lead author Dr. Ramin Mojtabai of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
“The ‘couch,’ or, more generally, long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, was for so long a hallmark of the practice of psychiatry. It no longer is,” he said.
Today’s psychiatrists get reimbursed by insurance companies at a lower rate for a 45-minute psychotherapy visit than for three 15-minute medication visits, he explained.
LENSES FOR LAZY EYE
A small number of U.S. children are trying an experimental surgery to prevent virtual blindness from lazy eye diagnosed too late, or too severe, for standard treatment.
Up to 5 percent of children have amblyopia, commonly called lazy eye, where one eye is so much stronger than the other that the brain learns to ignore the weaker eye. Untreated, the proper neural connections for vision don’t form, eventually rendering that eye useless.
Catch it early and it can be fixed by patching over the strong eye, or using special drops in it, so the brain is forced to use the weak eye. But the older the child is, the less effective the treatment — and by age 9, brain-eye connections are pretty well set.
The new approach: Implantable lenses, the same kind that nearsighted adults can have inserted for crisper vision — but that aren’t officially approved for use in children.
PROSTATE SCREENING
The blood test millions of men undergo each year to screen for prostate cancer leads to so much unnecessary anxiety, surgery and complications that doctors should stop testing elderly men, and it remains unclear whether the test is worthwhile for younger men, a federal task force concluded Monday.
ally ladak :
Date: August 16, 2008 @ 6:26 am
thank thank for sharing