psisci said:
Ok I will bite!! I am not sure who read what where, but in NM the practicum is part of the program of training, but each person wishing to prescribe must do so UNDER a physician for 2 years minimum before they can even apply for independent prescribing rights. IN LA psychs who want to do RxP must always do so in colloboration with, and be supervised by an MD.
Hi Psisci. I know you hate what you perceive to be an arrogant tone in my ranting about psychologists prescribing. Having been on both sides of the fence, and seeing generally piss-poor understanding of psychopharm by midlevels in residency now, I'm sure you understand my position.
That said, I'll ask a few candid questions that the other psychologists in training will again become annoyed with. I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not as rhetorical statements.
In reference to above, you say that you must prescribe under a physician for two years. But not a psychiatrist? Isn't this the a large part of the argument that psychologists are making (who asked them anyway?)? i.e. Primary care docs don't know enough to prescribe psychotropics? When was the last time psychiatrists butted in and said that we should do testing since master's level psychologists (I know, I know) aren't in underserved areas? See the ironic dichotomy?
On a more "real world" note. The prescribing that occurs "under a physician..." As I'm sure you've seen, physicians don't have the time to pour over in detail, charts and whatnot all day as psychologists try to prescribe the proper medications. The amount of actual quality supervision will likely be bad and of not much use. And by PCPs no less, who psychology has made the original argument is unqualified de facto.
Having said that, I TOTALLY agree that the residency makes the doc, and this part is very lacking in any MS or RxP prep program out there. I would love to see a manditory 1-2 year residency program be a requirement, but the main impedement to this has been you all! Yes, psychiatrists.
Not entirely true. While psychiatrists oppose this push for very understandable reasons, the psychologists do themselves no favors by posting and releasing those incredibly smug, insolent, and childish "rxp updates" whereby they make the classic 3rd year medical student "Only I.....was able to catch that incredibly-hard-to-diagnose condition that my preceptors missed. Ha HA!" Virtually all other statements made by these Hawaii and other psychologists are, from a physician's perspective (i.e. my own) to reek of inexperience and one who is gluttonous from a perceived newfound power. All this while they manage to disseminate even more misinformation and start the intellectual boll rolling for increased privilages with less comprehensive training (i.e. predoctoral psychopharm classes that should waive post-doctoral classes).
I haven't seen a psychologist yet in one of these asinine "updates," which reads more like axis propaganda, stating that psychiatrists or psychopharm has been more complicated than they thought. This is likely because from a medical standpoint, they don't know what they don't know.
I was very happy to do a 1 year residency program in medical psych at an inpatient hospital, and I learned more in my (total 5 years) there than I ever did in school. Psychopharm is also an art, above and beyond the science etc, and that cannot be taught in a classroom.
I really feel if psychiatry and psychology agreed to work together on this, it would be a great addition to our dismal mental health system...but so far we cannot 🙁
On a completely separate note, I take exception to the calling of psychology internships or post-doc whatevers being called "residency." Not a big deal to you, I know...nonetheless, a completely inaccurate and incomparable term.
Why did you do five years of medical psych training? What did your typical day entail? I remember you posting long ago about rounding with the psychiatrist and asking about liver function enzymes, ammonia levels, and stuff like that. Is that what it was about?
I 100% agree with you that psychopharmacology is an art as much as a science. This is another concept that psychologists, eager to quantify everything in discrete easily digestible EQS diagrams, will not apparently understand. I'll shock the world when I say this, and remember that I am a scientist in some ways too, and understand statistics better than the average physician and probably many psychologists but - you can't research everything and quantify everything in medicine. EBM is great, and has taken the field of medicine a long way, but its limitations are sweeping as well at this stage. It's unfortunate that psychologists refuse to accept that there is the art form to medicine, not just psychopharm, and that medicine is a thinking field. Not a cookbook field. Ideas must be tried and tinkered with, which often greatly wind up helping the patient. We can't just create a huge flow diagram that has a list of all patient's diagnoses with concomitant medical conditions then slide down the decision tree until their ass hits the bottom box which says, "Effexor XR at 75mg PO QD!"
The real world is much more complex than that. I'm glad it is, or our field would be much less interesting.