I think what is so concerning is the way several psychologists who respond on this site give the impression that they think prescribing medications is easy.
Wow, the non-medically trained claiming they know what constitutes proper medical training over those who are medically trained, and with no specific data to back it up other than a claim that there's others in the field that disagree with me.
And my opinion is "outweighed" despite that all 50 states, in fact almost all nations (even third world countries) give clear and similar guidelines on what is proper medical training to prescribe medications, but I'm, outweighed in the eyes of someone without medical training.
Wow, this is pretty sad that these arguments are coming from people that I'm assuming have graduate degrees or working on them.
Hey if someone could at least pull out some real scientific data instead of talking points, the debate IMHO would actually have some substance.
Repeat: the only real data so far is the military study and it did not offer any conclusive data that was applicable to the general public, nor similar to the bills that have been passed.
That said, psychology is a fine field and I'd be open to psychologist prescribers--though much more training would be needed than in the curriculums currently offered in the Oregon bill.
I have no more tolerance for psychiatrist who believes he can interpret an MMPI simply based on a statistics course than I do a psychologist who believes he can judge what is medically sound when he has no general medical training. Psychopharm does not count as general medical training. If you even start to think it does, you just proved my point that your knowledge of general medicine is pretty clueless. If you think that because you may find a few M.D.s who think it's alright (and I don't know who they are because I don't see them publically rallying M.D.s to support this cause), I'd hardly call that a proving your argument right.
I generally try not to make pointed comments, but for a graduate level student or above to claim expertise and argue with someone in a field with the expertise and have no data to support your argument other than political talking points is pretty ridiculous. There should be no tolerance for that IMHO. I'm wondering if any of the people pushing their political talking points actually read the one study which has almost no validity to this situation.
I think we'd all agree if someone with a sociology degree claimed they could do an MMPI without any training in psychology would be seen as absurd. Same here. I will apologize if any of you psychologists claiming the Oregon bill is "proper" medical training have an M.D., D.O. P.A. or R.N.
And by the way, feel free to take a look at my past posts. I've defended the field of psychology several times and I do have a degree in psychology.
I'd be happy to debate someone, in a friendly and truth seeking manner, if the person did have medical training (such as one of those "in my field") that busi26 suggested--if one were to appear here and use actual data, not talking points.
As for psychotropics, the largest prescriber of psychotropics are not psychiatrists. The largest body of prescribers are PCPs. This is published in several studies.
As I said in the past, I find no problem with psychologists working with M.D.s, even non-psychiatrist M.D. in making suggestions for psychotropics, but ultimately prescription power requires clinical training higher than just the equivalent of a few handful of weeks.