Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8277

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Sharfstein SS.
My 15 Minutes of Fame
Psychiatric News 2005 Aug 5; 40:(15):3
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/40/15/3

Notes:

What is the message for the audience of not only the “Today” show but of all the spinoff media events that occur as a result of this opportunity?

…First and foremost, we can tell the world about psychiatry-that psychiatrists are physicians and that our field is backed by science like other branches of medicine. In recent years, thanks to advances in neuroscience, brain secrets at the molecular and genetic levels are being revealed, identifying the close links between nature and nurture.

Most importantly, we can get the word out that psychiatric illness is real disease, and there are interrelated biochemical and psychosocial causes. These illnesses are recognizable, diagnosable, and highly treatable. The message “treatment works” must be said more than once…

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909