Some truths are self-evident…

News
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A month ago, I wrote about a woman who had arrived in our clinic on a remarkable regimen if medications [blitzed…]. To repeat:

She was brought to the clinic by her aunt who was taking care of her temporarily. She was a woman in her fifties with a cast on her lower leg from a fall. She was calm, alert, but couldn’t answer many questions. She was blitzed. She told me she’d fallen and broken her hip. But she knew neither the date nor the season. By history, she was obviously the ‘black sheep’ of the family – a failed marriage, no contact with her kids, psych hospitalizations, multiple rehabs for alcohol, benzodiazepine detox, etc. – moving from family member to family member. Her aunt had a piece of paper with her medications written out neatly:

    Seroquel 600 mg/day
    Trazadone 450 mg/day
    Depakote 2.5 Grams/day
    Neurontin [I forget how much too much]/day
    Cogentin 4 mg/day
    among other things…

…an outrageous cocktail!

So now I’ve seen her at two week intervals for two months.

http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2015/10/27/some-truths-are-self-evident/

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I take issue with this:

I’m not going to wind up on telepsychiatry today. I complain about enough things already. I think it’s a creation of some cost-cutting bean counter and ought to be outlawed as de facto malpractice rather than the subject of glowing articles in the Psychiatric News. I doubt I even have to explain why I think that, so I won’t. This is hardly my first encounter with such a case, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. Some truths are self-evident…

I see my psychiatrist via video link. It works fine. If I didn’t have access to this tech I would have to drive 4.5 hours each way and pay all of the associated costs. It may not be the bee’s knees for those who are highly symptomatic, but it’s just fine for those of us who are very stable and don’t need to spend nearly 10 hours driving just to get a prescription re-upped.

Not everyone can live in a major centre or wants to. Blech.

Pixel.