All the controversy over whether or not drug money is corrupting psychiatric practice is helping to break trust between doctors and patient.
Stories of Harvard psychiatrists taking big money from pharmaceutical companies; and then through their institutional influence push antipsychotics on kids based on questionable bipolar diagnoses (Harvard Psychiatrists Flunk Appearance of Propriety) and the lack of drug company payment disclosure by psychiatrists who present themselves in the media as medical experts (Stealth Marketers) destroy the crediblity of the profession.
Tara Parker-Pope explains the dissolution of trust in her NYT article Doctors and Patients: A Rocky Relationship.
- “About one in four patients feel that their physicians sometimes expose them to unnecessary risk, according to data from a Johns Hopkins study published this year in the journal Medicine. And two recent studies show that whether patients trust a doctor strongly influences whether they take their medication.”
Most people are reluctant to get psychiatric treatment in the first place because of the stigma of mental illness. Now a wall has been built between doctor and patient.
Parker Pope offers other reasons for patient distrust:
- Doctors have to spend less time with their clients do to “declining reimbursements and higher costs”.;
- Media reporting of medical errors;
- Direct-to-consumer advertising of medications have encouraged people to research their own aliments.
If there is reform and greater transparency in the psychiatric community and a more equal partnership between between doctor and patient, trust could be restored. However these patient demands are nonnegotiable.
