Imagine that you’re not feeling well, and you visit Dr. Ducknoise. The doctor asks you questions, nods knowingly at your answers, asks more questions, perhaps jots down some notes. Finally, he nods gravely.
“What is it, doc?” you ask.
“You’ve got UTW disorder,” he replies grimly.
“What’s that?”
“Under-the-weather disorder. It’s a serious illness. It’s why you have been feeling poorly.”
“What causes it?” you ask.
“Imbalances in the blood.”
“How do you know I’ve got it?”
“Because you have been feeling poorly.”
“Can you help?”
Dr. Ducknoise grimaces non-committedly.
“It’s a lifetime disorder, and it’s the leading cause of lost work hours,” he says. “But we do have some good medications. They’re called anti-UTW’s. We have four different kinds. I’m going to start you off on anti-UTW 1. We’ll try that for a week or so. If there’s no improvement, then we’ll switch you to anti-UTW 2. And so on. Once we find the one which works for you, you’ll have to take it for life.”
“For life?” you ask.
“Well, you don’t want to get sick again, do you?”
“Oh, no. But are there side effects?”
Dr. Ducknoise purses his lips thoughtfully, and nods.
“There are, but let’s not worry about those just now. Let’s concentrate on getting you healthy.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This, of course, is just imaginary – not something that would really happen. If a real doctor did practice in this way, we can be pretty sure that he’d start getting some negative comments on Angie’s List. And sooner or later, someone would turn him in to the state licensing board, and he would likely lose his license to practice medicine.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But the little scenario sketched out above is an exact parallel of what transpires in psychiatrists’ office every day, all over the world. Instead of the kind of explanatory diagnoses that real doctors give their patients, psychiatrists provide nothing more than rewordings of the presenting problem. For instance:
“I’ve been very despondent lately” becomes “You have major depressive disorder.”
“I’ve been down in the dumps for years” becomes “You have dysthymia.”
“I’m very distractible; my attention wanders” becomes “You have attention deficit disorder.”
“I worry all the time” becomes “You have generalized anxiety disorder.”
“I have outbursts of rage” becomes “You have intermittent explosive disorder.”
“My son won’t do a thing I tell him to” becomes “He has oppositional defiant disorder.”
And so on.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And like our imaginary Dr. Ducknoise, the psychiatrists have drugs.
Anti-depressants if one is depressed
Anti-anxiety pills if one is anxious
Neuroleptics if one is agitated/aggressive.
And so on.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And, amazingly, neither the state medical associations nor the state licensing boards utter a single word in protest.
It’s long past time to expose this fraud for what it is: drug-pushing charlatanism.