Title: Explain To Me Again Why Psychologists Can’t Prescribe Meds? | Thought Broadcast
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Explain To Me Again Why Psychologists Can’t Prescribe Meds?
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Content: A satisfactory alternative would be an integrated behavioral health/primary care clinic in which professionals like Dr Moore can consult with a psychiatrist ( or another “psychiatric prescriber”) to prescribe. This arrangement has been shown to work in many settings . It also allows for proper follow-up and limits the number of prescribers. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies salivate at the prospect of more people with prescribing authority—it directly expands the market for their drugs—but the fact is that most of them simply don’t work as well as advertised and cause unwanted side effects. ( More about that in a future post.) The bottom line is that there are ways of delivering mental health care in a more rational fashion, by people who know what they’re doing. As it currently stands, however, anyone with an MD (or DO, or NP) can prescribe a drug, even if others may possess greater experience or knowledge, or provide higher-quality care. As an MD, I’m technically licensed to perform surgery, but trust me, you don’t want me to remove your appendix. By the same token, overworked primary care docs whose idea of treating depression is handing out Pristiq samples every few months are probably not the best ones to treat depression in the medically ill. But they do, and maybe it’s time for that to change.