My preceptor — the professor who was responsible for teaching me about psychopharmacology — continuously complained about “polypharmacy.”
I would roll my eyes heavenward and give him one of my usual “clever” retorts like,”Who the heck is she? Your cleaning lady, maybe??” Read more on What We Do With Antidepressants…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, depression, Diagnosis, Disease, Education, News, prescription drugs, Psychotherapy, Research by on Jul 20th, 2018. Comment. 
Okay, so my Continuing Medical Education Provider gave me every imaginable disclaimer on this one.
Abstracts at a meeting, so the demands were not as rigorous as for published articles. There could be confounding factors. A British study; maybe they aren’t wired the same way us yanks are. People who take a nap of at least a half hour during the day have lower blood pressure 4 mm. lower 24 hr. average systolic than folks who don’t. Espresso, on the other hand, raises blood pressure. This study was done on Italians. Are they wired like us? Drinking enough espresso may also be increasing the incidence of type 2 diabetes, by some kind of an effect on long term glucose (sugar) metabolism. Read more on Helpful Hints From A Former Caffeine Fiend…
There’s a joke about a woman whose blood pressure was 180/90. She didn’t think she had reason to be concerned. After all, she argued, 180/90 is the mathematical equivalent of 2/1 and that doesn’t seem so high, does it?
I once treated a young man of color, obese and sad looking, whose numbers were close to this – 170/100. And I was not laughing.
This young man was schizophrenic for sure, but pretty harmless. Life had beaten him down enough that his jail experiences — assault, as directed by disembodied “voices” — had him so frightened that he would never do anything the voices said. Not now, not ever, and I believed him.
As a psychiatric physician, I always managed to get “vital signs” on all patients. That should not have been a battle, but it was. I did not understand nor relate to the medical assistants who took them. Why? 18 months training after high school and they had not been nice to me — not at all — criticizing my lunch and the fact they did not think I worked hard enough.
I was concerned when I saw a blood pressure of 170/100. Patient said he had been on some kind of medicine. The best I could get with one of my “naming medicines and seeing what it sounded like” was hydrochlorothiazide — maybe. And of course the relevant parts of the chart were missing, as was the case more than actually finding anything.
He said he had stopped his medications a couple of days before because they gave
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