LANSING, Mich. (WILX) -When you visit your primary care doctor, do you feel that your mental health is being ignored?
If you answered “yes” … one Michigan doctor says, “You’re Not Alone,” and he believes he wrote the prescription for a cure.
Retired physician Dr. Robert Smith is on a national crusade for mental health-care reform.
Dr. Smith says traditional medicine ignores mental health.
He claims medical education hasn’t changed in more than 100 years, with only 2% of a doctor’s training devoted to mental health.
“Even though mental health is the most common health condition doctor’s face in practice,” Dr. Smith says.
That’s why he co-authored the book, “Has medicine lost its Mind! – Why Our Mental Health System Is Failing Us, and What Should Be Done To Cure It.”
The book details, Dr. Smith’s diagnosis, that most doctors ignore a patient’s mental health needs, because they weren’t trained to treat them. Dr. Smith admits, he was once part of the problem, until a pivotal patient encounter that changed his life.
It was a doctor’s office visit with a breast cancer patient.
“She would come in and say… ‘What are you going to do, why do I cry all the time, life is so un-fun, what do you think is going on?’ I was just frozen… I had no idea what to do with this human being,” Dr. Smith recalls.
He says that same scenario played out during several office visits, before the woman eventually died.“I was relieved when she died… finally I could relax… until two weeks later,” Dr. Smith says.
That’s when the woman’s husband dropped off a diary his wife had kept, critical of the care she received.
It read: “the young doctor doesn’t seem to know what to do with me, the young doctor just orders tests, the young doctor doesn’t seem to care, I wonder why he doesn’t do something.”
From that point on, Dr. Smith says he began listening more to his patient’s concerns.
“But I realized I still didn’t know what do do with panic disorders, depressed people, all sorts of mental problems, I had no clue of what to do,” Dr. Smith says.
So he left his lucrative primary care practice, devoting the past forty-plus years of his medical career to teaching and research… co-writing “patient-centered” training guides, teaching primary care doctors how to conduct mental health care.
Even though these medical text books are widely accepted, they aren’t widely used.
That’s when he decided to write the book Has Medicine Lost It’s Mind?Not for doctors, but for the general public.
He wants the masses to know that only 25% of people with mental health disorders are seeing a psychiatrist, or psychologist.
“But the remaining 75%, of this most common health disorder, is seen by people like me, who weren’t trained to take care of it,” Dr. Smith says.
Until the medical profession changes its mind about training doctors to treat mental health disorders… Dr. Smith prescribes patience.
“I always say don’t blame your primary care doctor, it’s not their fault… they simply haven’t been trained,” Dr. Smith says.
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