typeB-md said:
i have no problem being in medical school. i have a problem with the vast majority of medical students feeling that they "deserve" to do well and need to be spoon fed material.
And whining is about small petty things, not health or social issues. People aren't "whining" about terry schiavo are they?
The OP does have an obvious problem, and yes it may be 'amenable' to pharmacological treatment, but what the hell ever happened to working through your problems? I can bench press twice my weight as a result of hard work and motivation, yet i know that muscles are 'amenable' to pharmacological treatment. The only reason growth hormone is illegal is because it confers and advantage. Not to mention that once you stop taking the supplement, you go back to having less muscle. You don't think that once the OP stops taking his meds he'll go right back to feeling the same way?
and it's funny you should mention depression b/c i was involved in a depression counseling group during my undergrad. my role was a personal fitness advisor. these students were "tired, lonely, not wanting to do their usual fun things, etc" and i talked with many of these students and asked what they did for physical fitness and most of them said they did not do much. i also asked them about their self image and most of them replied they are uncomfortable with how they feel about themselves. I then gave them a 6month exercise plan. For those students that followed the plan, just over 80% of them said they "had more energy and felt better about themselves" and were no longer "depressed." So when people tell me that drugs work, i don't doubt it. But a longer term plan needs to be in the form of self resolution, not Pfizer.
yes, there is a reason psychiatry exist, it's because they needed a place to stick all of the nutjob medical students who couldn't interact with other normal people. psychiatrists are weird and the stuff they come up with is even more weird. I'm not denying that neurolgical problems exist because of course they do. I'm simply saying that i think overall they are quacks who take advantage of the needy. I'll stop at that because i could write a thesis on how weird these folks are.
first of all, smilenwink, I apologize that this thread has been hijacked by "typeB-md". It is great that you were able to seek help and with the proper help, you should definitely be able to manage your distress through an informed decision with either counseling, medicine, or some combination of both. best wishes to you, and hopefully this won't impair you from continuing through medical school.
the other comment i wanted to make was to typeB-md. i must say, my impression is that you really have your own issues to work out still. you seem to have gone through your own rough times and it is good that you have an attitude of being proactive in your life, but you are generalizing a very negative and misinformed impression of psychiatry and mental illness. of course, i wouldn't be posting this if i wasn't a future psychiatrist (in the interest of full disclosure of bias).
it is the hardest thing to do, coming to grips with the fact that behavioral problems have some grounding in biology. and there is a big chunk of the world that agrees with you, but i feel sad for you because you are really displaying some naivety. you have a lot to learn, and while i concede that there are "weird" people in psychiatry, you'll also find some of the most inspirational and wise people practicing psychiatry. people who aren't just trying to push pills to make money, but are interested in holistically doing whats best for a person in crippling agony, the doctors that i met like that see the world with maturity and live there life as typeB as there is and cherish what really is important in life. the people they treat are in an agony that ultimately supercedes any physical illness, because if you are mentally ill, it doesn't really matter how you are physically.
i wholly encourage people to challenge the paradigms of psychiatry as a field and i plan on doing it myself, as there is no question it is in its infancy relative to cardiology or other fields. challenging it though is different than being a pompous whiner. you don't even have an open mind about discussing it or learning about it (at least it seems that way). maybe you have had bad interactions with psychiatrists or are in denial about your own potential issues with mental illness, but i assure you that mental illness exists broadly (on the level of primary care) and has empirically been proven to be benefitted on the individual and society level with pharmacologic treatment. this is how all medical fields work right now, through evidence based medicine and the body of evidence in psychiatry continues to grow. of course, the goal should be to ultimately solve the problem and avoid meds, and all good psychiatrists know that, but the goal is to have a person be able to function in their lives first and foremost.
there are a lot of fields of medicine where half the diseases would be cured if somebody could stand up there and grandstand and yell at people to take control of their lives and not have unprotected sex, overeat, etc etc but that doesn't invalidate the fields that manage patients who don't (or more accurately and realistically can't) take the proper lifestyle modification to change the course of their illness. it sounds like you believe the field of medicine should withhold pharmacological interventions on anything that could potentially be alleviated through time or behavior modification. so if you have migraines, just suck it up and don't drink caffeine or go near any bright lights etc. or if you have diabetes, don't take any meds, lose weight and never eat a cookie. don't let pfizer push that pill into you, blah blah blah. its always a combination of diathesis and environmental stress. and the doctor needs to practically use a combination of both biological and behavioral methods to treat patients. if you think psychiatry is the only field that is sometimes inclined to err on the side of medicating patients, you are sorely mistaken and truly will have your eyes opened when you hit clinical medicine. Good luck and keep an open mind in your training, you'll learn more as a self appointed type B person that way. and then you'll be a better doctor, which is the goal right, not the grades.
I actually put that on my online evaluation for the last block. "sorry my class is such a bunch of whiners. You guys are doing fine."
