What is it about?
Medicine produces doctors untrained in mental health and poorly trained in physical diseases and prevention. The resulting incompetence in our untrained practitioners wastes $2-3 trillion every year, while causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and hundreds of millions of distraught patients.
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Why is it important?
Medicine has been unresponsive to pleas for change since the 1970s. This article urges that an informed public demand an independent investigation of medicine to demonstrate for everyone that its nonscientific approach causes poor health care and waste in the trillions--and that an independent federal board, analogous to the Federal Reserve (which controls banking), must take over control of medicine.
Perspectives
Untrained, I failed miserably in practice to the great detriment of hundreds of patients --not unlike all my physician colleagues. Vowing to help doctors as well as patients, I trained in the psychological and social aspects of medicine, including mental health. I developed evidence-based methods for training doctors in mental health and good relational practices. After and I and hundreds of other academic doctors warned medicine -- to no avail -- to train its graduates to be competent in these areas, I decided to appeal to the public to inform them of the preventable carnage so that they demand change from the top down. Medicine won't change on its own.
Robert Smith
Michigan State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The mental health crisis: Only top down regulation will cure medicine’s folly, PLOS Mental Health, September 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000439.
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