I want to tell you all something I learned from my top notched psychiatrist that I live to far away

[hunter]

1. I think this is a good place to post this. Thanks.

This is a huge problem in all of U.S. medicine. Patients have to fight for what they need at the very times they are least able to fight. It is especially true in mental health or pain management. People are often left in chronic states of dysfunctionality lasting years.

God knows I've been fortunate to have strong advocates when I've been in my deepest, darkest places.

In a perfect world a doctor would be a patient's strongest advocate. But there are many things standing in the way. We have a health insurance industry that will only pay for "assembly line medicine" and automatically deny any unusual claims. We have an idiotic "War on Drugs" which leaves many doctors reluctant to prescribe certain medicines that are very effective but commonly abused, and turns a few bad-apple doctors into true criminals selling prescriptions to anyone and everyone who can afford their fee. And in a perfect world pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be pushing their most profitable drugs, they would instead be quietly manufacturing and selling the best, most effective drugs, not $5-a-pill replacements for more effective five-cent-a-pill generics.

If we established a single-payer medical system, removed the insurance companies from the process, and treated drug addiction as a public health problem not a crime, then maybe then more doctors would see themselves as their patients' strongest advocates and not as overburdened assembly line workers, pill sales people, or potential targets of Big Brother's War on Drugs SWAT teams.