It's not the psychiatry drugs that are the problem, it's the everything else. I'd say a year of general pathophysiology and pharmacology followed by a year of psychopharmacology would be sufficient, if they were actual in-depth courses and not glorified night school.
Bad prescribers that are fully trained doubt justify prescribers that are even more loosely trained.
I believe, "basic pathophysiology training" is covered in the psych RxP training courses.
That statement shows just how little you understand general pathophysiology and pharmacology. Medicine is far less algorithmic than you would believe because people aren't machines and tend to not for very well into boxes (general medicine is very similar to psychiatry in that regard). That is why most of us laugh it off any time some premed mentions computers replacing physicians- two thirds of doctoring is proper assessment and everything leading up to treatment, picking the right treatment is a fraction of the job.
Hey, feel free to take Step 1 after your course if you want to go that route. Then I'd be fine with whatever model of training you choose.
I fully understand the statistical argument, but it throws patients under the bus that don't need to be there. In medicine, we have a word for those patients- malpractice litigants. Following algorithms doesn't absolve you of the errors you make on the great number of people that fall outside of them.
Some of the prescriber courses I've seen discussed in the past are as short as 100 hours. Not semester hours, literal hours. I put in more hours than that in one week of OB/Gyn in medical school lol.
Poor clinical judgment, sure. You need to understand the evidence and understand its limitations in relation to your individual patient to properly apply it. That is one of the things non-physicians misunderstand about EBM, it isn't perfect because the studies it is based on always have limitations.
Sounds like a good plan to me. If a psychologist can't demonstrate the acquisition of the basic knowledge that is expected of a med student, then they probably shouldn't be mucking around with this. Maybe the NPs and PAs should have to pass this too since everyone is calling them doctor these days.
This isn't about false positives and negatives. This is about algorithms not appropriately taking into account things about patients at all. A good example of this is early management of patients with high blood pressure- the first protocols were the same for everyone. We figured a patient is a patient is a patient. Clever clinicians noticed that certain patients were not responding to the protocol, and were ending up on far more meds than expected. The problem? The original studies didn't take into account race, and it turns out that entire classes of medication didn't work all that well on African Americans. That's why we prescribe CCBs and thiazides as first line in AAs, but protocols are different for whites. Blindly following protocols neglects study flaws that result in large errors such as this that are far more than "false positives/negatives." You'd say doctors that were astute enough to notice these problems were neglecting standard of care and practicing bad medicine because they weren't following protocol, but the "art" of medicine people speak of is actually more of properly interpreting data beyond a cursory read of the protocol or study and using that data to properly serve your patients.
Ok, so what algorithms do we have for all psychiatric conditions?
The learning of med school is much more than the first 2 years of classroom based learning. The next 2 years, with clinical rotations, are when a lot of the learning happens, and students are not missing those.
Makes sense. How about the NPs and PAs? They do 18-24mon of classes and then clinicals.
will this be associated with an increase in the average salary for psychologists?
Good thing I never you rattling due to turf protectionism...
