Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that drugs are seen as a political issue. For some reason, other people think that it is their business what you put into your body, even when it's medicine. A side effect of this is that you get doctors that "don't believe in X illness" or "don't believe in treating X with medication Y". As a result lots of people are going to get inadequate treatment for their problems.

When you read forums discussing ADHD you'll find plenty of stories where people were unable to get medication, because they had to change doctors and the new doctor was unwilling to prescribe it.[0][1] Many of those people will likely have their lives fall apart following that.

Discouraging drug based treatments further is likely going to cause more situations like this. I think what would really help is if mental illness treatment became more specialized. You'd go to a doctor that really knows the illness you're dealing with.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/antrln/doctor_refuses...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/lb5gq3/psychiatrist_w...

"For some reason, other people think that it is their business what you put into your body, even when it's medicine."

Let's say we had a legal regime in which you could go to a pharmacy with a prescription your wrote yourself and get it filled. Opioids, stimulants, cannabis, ketamine, whatever.

Wouldn't you still advise a friend that they should find a credentialed doctor and ask them to write a prescription before taking some of the more powerful substances? It's important to be able to get the advice of an expert, particularly when that advice goes against your intuitions.

Issue is that your pharmacy is pretty much standardized. Walk into 100 pharmacies and ask for the same thing and you’ll walk out with the same thing from each one. Same inputs = same outputs.

Credentialed doctors are all over the place. Go see 100 psychiatrists with the same issue and you’ll get as many treatments.

This is because there is a disconnect between medication and our understanding of the underlying mechanisms driving mental health issues

I think that this a bit of a separate topic. I wasn't advocating for making all drugs freely available, but rather wanted to caution that there are already plenty of doctors who try to not prescribe drugs based on some moral feelings (or fear).

However, on this topic I do think that there should be fewer restrictions on what you can buy. I have asthma. I would like to have an emergency inhaler for those rare situations where I have trouble breathing properly. But I can't have one, because asthma medications are prescription only here and I do not have health insurance. I am uncertain whether it's worth spending the likely €100-200 it would cost out of pocket to see the doctors and do the tests to get the prescription. So I make do with caffeine, wet blankets and sleeping upright on the rare occasion that I have a problem.

I can afford the medicine, but the mandatory doctors visits are too much. As I said though, this is a bit of a different issue.

That's definitely a problem, but it's not the only problem. Medications often have side effects, and sometimes for some people they are worse than the symptoms they are supposed to manage.

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