Trainee doctor from LEEDS jumped to his death after failing exams--omg when ws ths??

[Dr Noodle]

Originally Posted by Muffin2

ps. i hate psychiatry and psycology. its far to wishy washy. half the time they make a condition up just to suit the patients symptoms. (just done a mental health rotation)

Eh? Should we just leave the mentally ill to rot in the gutter then??

[Muffin2]

thats a bit of a daft comment to make Dr Noodle.
and no. someone else who has chose to specialise in psychiatry can help them. i don't like it therefore i'm not going into it.

[Dr Noodle]

That's fair enough about not liking it. I doubt I would either, I try to avoid psychiatric patients at work but why call it wishy washy? I thought you were referring to it as a meaningless speciality.

[Muffin2]

wishy washy as in not exact.

psychiatry at least trys to find a chemical or biological reason for something. psycology on the other hand, that is pointless.

[Dr Noodle]

But not every mental illness has a chemical/biological cause. Take schizophrenia for example. That could be caused by faulty wiring or whatever (recently heard something about the shape having an effect) in the brain but it could also be caused by environmental factors such as a series of traumatic events.

I don't have much understanding of the differences between the two but so far I've taken it to be that psychology forms the theories and psychiatry tries to treat (with drugs mainly it seems, especially in America).

[Muffin2]

erm i think you'll find when you start your medical degree that all mental illnesses do have a chemical/biological/physical cause. it was the first thing we were taught when we first did psycology of health behaviour.
we may not know the exact underlying pathology, but its there, it just hasn't been discovered yet. theres a lot of that in medicine.

[PureMedic]

It's true that psychiatry is still wishy-washy, however, the trade-off is that treatment is relatively easy with the current level of knowledge. Treatment usually involves either an anti-psychotic (± an anticholinergic), or an anxiolytic/sedative, an antidepressant, lithium carbonate or citrate, other neuron - stabilising drugs, a small choice of dugs for ADD/ADHA or/and narcolepsy, plus drugs used in the management of drug-dependency. Now, how difficult is that? In your spare time you can muse about ten or more types of serotonin/5-HT receptors, four or more dopamine receptors, mu1 & mu2, kappa and delta opioid receptors, discover that tramadol is an order of magnitude weaker than codeine as a 'narcotic' and only just barely fits the description of an opioid , and think about different antipsychotics - unconventional ones and how regularly one has to do full blood counts (CBC for USA folk); then you can ponder on the many thousands of articles and books on schizophrenia and discover that apart from the fact that dopamine is involved in some way, nobody actually knows anything about schizophrenia and that there are more views on it than there are doctors. One can fraternise with psychologists, particularly if you're a straight man and the psychologist is a pretty single, ('straight') female, or the converse if one is of an opposite persuasion. So that's all you need to know to earn money for your bread and butter. :-)

[PureMedic]

Please refrain from addressing me as "god".

[PureMedic]

Originally Posted by Eponine_hugo

At risk of sounding heartless medicine can be a gruelling career and u have to take the rough with the smooth, if you can't handle a few negative,irrate comments and take them for what they are; the vented frustrations of an over-worked senior, then how will you cope when your working as a doctor and not only do ur seniors treat you poorly but a lot of the patients do too?

It was the fact that someone had done this for the first time in my life. I'm older and wiser and such things don't phase me at all now. I don't blame patients should they treat me poorly (they don't though), I rather think it comes with the territory. Patients don't have much idea about matters that doctors need to bear in mind. One gets older and matures and bears in mind that patients don't care how much one knows until they know that one cares. Being kind to patients and showing that one cares about what they are saying almost eliminates problems - for myself at least.

[Gizmo says -]

wiffout reading the story, ma forts were wif the parents, but also to the 'undreds of asian students that go to med skool every year wiffout wanting to be in medicine.

reading the story only enforces that view.

lesson - dont force your sons and daughters into medicine, and offspring should be helped to make decisions about their own careers in school - life management should be on the school curriculum for sure.