Healing, and not just prescribing

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:13:00 GMT

The news this week that antidepressant drugs are no better than placebo underlines just how drug-dependent conventional medicine has become.

Even though researchers had to use the powers of America's freedom of information legislation in order to see antidepressant drug trials that had never been published, it's hardly been a secret that the drugs don't work too well.

It's also not a secret that the 'talking cures', such as cognitive behavioural therapy, work better than the antidepressants, especially in cases of mild to moderate depression. One study even found that patients fared better than drugs if they received a measly postcard from the hospital! It wasn't supposed to be an act of kindness from hospital administrators - it was just that there wasn't the staff available to phone the patient about the next appointment.

So if everyone has known about the poor response from the antidepressants and they've also known about the efficacy of therapy, why haven't doctors been pushing the 'talking cures' to patients?

It's certainly true that the lack of resource plays a part - but I suspect it is more down to the fact that the doctor is wedded to his prescription pad. It is, after all, a quick and easy response - even if it'll do little to help the patient.

I hope the latest antidepressant study makes the doctor stop and think. I also hope it might remind him about the reasons he took the arduous path to become a doctor in the first place - to heal, and not just to act as a drug company salesman.

Why doctors never understand depression

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:13:00 GMT

Doctors and medicine are part of the current scientific zeitgeist to reduce things down to their smallest component part. That way, they think they can really understand things.

So, the greatest achievement for any doctor is to become a specialist - someone who knows more about a particular function, organ or part of an organ than any of his colleagues.

Reductionism is the converse of wholism, where a diagnostician will try to understand a specific problem by looking at a wide spectrum of possibilities.

And by being a specialist rather than a generalist, the doctor misses out on the biggest influence on health of them all – our minds. Our thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears have a far bigger part to play in our wellbeing than anything else, as a new report by the World Health Organization has confirmed.

In a poll of 245,000 people, the WHO discovered that depression is far more disabling than angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes. That means our thoughts are more ‘real’, and produce more palpable reactions, than the deadliest of recognised diseases.

Doctors will deal with the mot severe forms of depression, but most of us who are depressed are in a grey fog of disconnection or disenchantment, for which the doctor will advise us to merely ‘pull ourselves together’.

Mild depression is, for the doctor, just one of those things that we all go through on occasions.

But just suppose that our mental reactions aren’t just some vaguely interesting side-show to a health problem – instead, they are the very cause of the problem.

What would our doctors do then with their pills?

Adverse Reactions : depression

Healing, and not just prescribing

Why doctors never understand depression