I’m stuck on the most recent Nemeroff revelation – the ghost-written Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders. I thought I was done, but it came in the mail today, my 31¢ Amazon purchase. As Carlat’s Blog reported, it’s weighted towards SmithKline Beecham’s SSRI, Paxil. But that’s old news. Frankly, the book itself is amazingly simplistic. Were I a Primary Care Physician receiving it, I would feel insulted, even if it were handed out for free. It would be hard to believe that the book was written by a practicing physician. With each disorder, there’s a flow chart to follow for treatment. Problem is, they’re all the same. Make a diagnosis. Start a treatment. Re-evaluate in the future. Keep treating or change treatments. That might be good advice for a medical student as he/she starts seeing patients for the first time. But it’s hardly useful for a Primary Care Physician trying to learn something useful in treating the sea of patients complaining of psychiatric symptoms.
Pretty similar. Very simplistic. Plenty monotonous. This book is written in a format one might use for an untrained military corpsman with no access to medical care – not to a physician who has presumably made it through medical school. I stand by my sarcastic book cover above. This is a poor showing, no matter who wrote it…
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.