Are You Anxious? The Government Wants to Know!
From the New York Times!
Those fun folks at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force have come out with another guideline:
All adults under age 65 need to be screened for anxiety.
I know what you’re thinking!
Some primary care physicians expressed concern that adding an additional responsibility to their wide-ranging checklist for brief patient appointments is implausible.
Dr. Pbert of the task force said that those providers should “do what they already do on a daily basis: Juggle and prioritize.”
Juggle and Prioritize!? Did he just say that?
But let’s not get too enthusiastic about this. The article goes further:
“When providers say, ‘You must have a disorder, here, take this,’ we could face an overprescribing problem.”
So, bottom line: Ask patients if they feel anxious. If they say “No. I’m not anxious at all!” you need to immediately refer the patient to a trained health professional. Such patients are clearly delusional!
U.S. health “care” has become a feedback loop. A needy, fearful population demands a pill for every minimal condition or bad day, prompting over-diagnosis and over-prescription, leading to more unrealistic expectations and demands to be free of discomfort or worry, resulting in…and on…and on…and on.
Doctors have become terribly, terminally complicit in enabling an accelerating loss of stoicism and reserve, and now we get the feeble result we helped train.
“PCPs were estimated to require 26.7 h/day, comprising of 14.1 h/day for preventive care, 7.2 h/day for chronic disease care, 2.2 h/day for acute care, and 3.2 h/day for documentation and inbox management.” – Journal of Gen. Int. Med. 7/22
A bad situation can always be made worse.
Do what I did. Retire at age 64. Not my problem anymore. Easy for me to do as I saved up the dollars to do it. My wonderful wife died before me and I had a mentally handicapped adult son I have guardianship of to take care of. I was running constantly from office, hospital to home to make sure my son was o.k. Did it for a year and a half after my lovely wife died and I was done with medicine after that. Due to my son’s behavior in adolescence we couldn’t take vacations. Once he passed through that, he’s very pleasant now and am glad my wife got to see that transition before she died. He behaves fine now at age 28. We were going to take a vacation but she got sick. (Stage 4 lung cancer from our house due to Radon gas. She never smoked in her life. House is abated now and level is extremely low. We didn’t know about Radon and Sally had to stay home to care for our son. It’s how she got it.)
I enjoyed my job in spite of hospital and call work when we had a paper record. Computers came in and perverted primary care to no end. I’m not computer “illiterate” as I had some training in college in the mid-70’s in Basic, Fortran and a little bit of machine language and do a bit of programming in Linux now and could afford my first p.c. in the early 90’s. I could see that EHR was using computers to make doctors jobs more miserable. Granted, I did love online labs and radiology reports as I could access them really fast. But making me type on a keyboard as opposed to dictating was an “effffing” waste of time. I was glad I was able to walk away from this specialty and DO NOT recommend primary care to “ANYONE”. Kurt Savegnago, M.D. (retired)
Those political morons caused more stress and anxiety over the course of the last 3 years!!
Lock downs! Job loss! Foreclosures! Investments tanked! Threats, coercion, intimidation!!
I hold them totally responsible!!!