We Need More Unapologetic Psychiatrists…..

 

I am not sure he would agree with the characterization but I came up with this title when I decided to comment on Daniel Morehead, MD.  I have never met him but I have read everything he has written in the Psychiatric Times.  He is director of residency training in general psychiatry at Tufts. In the most recent column, I notice the heading Affirming Psychiatry – that I wish I had thought of.  That was one of the primary goals of this blog when I started writing it 13 years ago.

This month’s column was titled Psychotherapy: Lies Cost Lives (1).  He starts writing about a New York Times column about psychotherapy that starts positive but rapidly shifts to ambivalent. He points out that this is characteristic of most headings that have to do with psychiatry and speculates about the origins.  Controversy, mouse clicks, and advertising dollars for sure.  He lists several titles and several themes of articles that with similarities and points out the only logical conclusion:

“The take-home message is that psychiatry rests on shaky foundations and does not quite know what it is doing, rather like someone feeling their way through a darkened room. Psychiatry, as usual, lags behind the breezy confidence of other medical fields, where no one wrings their hands about whether antihypertensives really work or whether surgery is just a lingering form of inhuman medieval butchery.”

That is certainly one way to describe journalistic gaslighting. I have offered several explanations for it on this blog.  First, folk psychology. Trying to figure out basic motivations and behavior of the people we encounter on a day-to-day basis is an adaptive human skill.  Many people think that psychiatry is therefore just common sense and that anyone can do it – at least until they encounter problems severe enough to where that level of common sense fails completely.  Second, there is the impression that anyone who prescribes psychiatric medications is basically equivalent to a psychiatrist. That is a trivialization of the psychiatric skill set and training.   Third, antipsychiatry is a cottage industry in the US and other countries and our detractors have had an inordinate amount of success in getting their rhetoric published in both the popular press and professional publications. The previous post on this blog was all about that. There are no other equivalent movements attacking other medical specialties even though their good outcomes are equivalent and their bad outcomes are generally much worse.  Fourth, , the reality is that about 40,000 psychiatrists go to work every day in the US.  The demand for psychiatrists is high. That demand is fueled by successful treatment and a niche that is unfilled by other medical staff.  Fifth, at least part of that demand is because psychiatrists have unique skills. We are the treatment providers of last resort, and other specialists know that and refer patients at all levels of acuity. The only way that happens is if you know what you are doing.

Psychotherapy is part of that skill set and that is the focus of Dr. Morehead’s column.  The science is there, even though there is a constant debate about clinical trial design and replicability.  Specific brands of psychotherapy have been investigated and shown to work.  There is also research into important non-specific factors in psychotherapy that branded therapies have in common. Even more basic than that are the interviewing techniques and courses taught to second year psychiatric residents focused on facilitating information exchange with patients for both diagnostic formulation and intervention. Communication is a critical skill in psychiatry.  In this era of checklists, screening, and electronic health records – it is easy to forget there is a much larger set of important information and like all things it requires a lot of training to do it right. It is that body of information that allows for the treatment of each patients as a unique person.  Personalized medicine has become a buzzword lately but from a communication perspective psychiatrists have been providing that for decades. 

These basic skills in talking with people and talking in therapeutic ways are hardly ever mentioned in discussions about psychiatrists. Criticism of psychiatry commonly seeks to portray psychiatrists unidimensionally - as excessive prescribers of medication rather than communicators.  Throughout my career the number one reason I was consulted was to establish communication with a person and figure things out where nobody else could.

Even in the case of prescribing medications, there is typically a lot more going on than a discussion of medications. One of my colleagues established the largest clozapine clinic and long-acting injectable medication clinics I have ever seen.  When he moved on, his patients asked me regularly where he was and how he was doing.  They valued the relationship with him even when he was providing a unique medical service. Ghaemi has written about existential psychotherapy and how it can occur during appointments that are medication focused (2,3).

The overall message that Dr. Morehead is trying to convey is that psychiatrists cannot let others characterize what we do.  When that happens there are multiple agendas operating that can lead to the clear distortion that psychiatry is not quite up to the level of other medical disciplines.  There is typically an overidealization of those other branches of medicine with a focus on innovations that often do not materialize.  The real message rarely gets out and that is – psychiatrists are uniquely trained, we are interested in problems that nobody else is and that other physicians often avoid, and we are good at what we do.  It is highly problematic that journalists seem reluctant to get that message out to the public. When I first read Dr. Morehead’s writing I found it refreshing because there are very few psychiatrists who want to get that message out. Most will cave in to the first suggestion of a level of uncertainty that every specialist in medicine has to deal with – the persistent risk no matter how small and the lack of a guaranteed outcome.

I look forward to a new generation of psychiatrists who can start to set the record straight.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplementary:

Decided to add this explanation anticipating the typical criticism:  “Well he is arrogant isn’t he? We always knew he was arrogant.  All psychiatrists are arrogant!”  When I say unapologetic – I mean unapologetic for just existing and trying to help people.  That is the level that psychiatrists are forced to operate at that no other medical specialist is. There are the usual misunderstandings, errors, and adverse outcomes in psychiatry that there are in any other medical specialty.  There are psychiatrists who are burned out, forced to practice in a way that they would rather not, and even personality disordered - just like any other specialty.  But in those other specialties the assumption is that these problems are handled on a case-by-case basis by the responsible physician, clinic or hospital administrative structure, or medical board. There is no similar assumption in psychiatry.  Instead, there is an assumption that the entire profession can be condemned for some adverse outcome, unprofessional conduct, historical event, or any unreasonable criticism that someone can come up with. As I have pointed out in the previous post - many criticisms are fabricated or just absurd.

So when you read these unrealistic criticisms about psychiatry in the papers – keep in mind that there has been a doubling down on the rhetoric unlike what happens with any other specialty in medicine. Use that knowledge to moderate your reaction to it. 

References:

1:  Morehead D. Psychotherapy: Lies Cost Lives. Psychiatric Times 40(11).  Published online on November 10, 2023  https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/psychotherapy-lies-cost-lives

2:  Ghaemi SN. Rediscovering existential psychotherapy: The contribution of Ludwig Binswanger. American journal of psychotherapy. 2001 Jan;55(1):51-64.

3:  Ghaemi SN, Glick ID, Ellison JM. A Commentary on Existential Psychopharmacologic Clinical Practice: Advocating a Humanistic Approach to the" Med Check". The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 2018 Apr 24;79(4):6935.

Photo Credit:

Many thanks to Eduardo Colon, MD

 

  

The Best Neurosurgery Clinic in the World

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I wrote this editorial in 2010 for the Minnesota Psychiatric Society newsletter Ideas of Reference as part of my role as the President at the time. Since then things continue to go in the wrong direction.  We no longer have insurance that covers the Mayo Clinic. My wife continues to do very well.

 

"We have the best neurosurgery clinic in the world." My wife Linda was in a conversation with a staff person at the Mayo Clinic, and somewhere along the line that statement was made. Just a few weeks earlier she had been diagnosed as having a growth hormone secreting pituitary adenoma and we were in the process of looking for neurosurgeons. I was concerned about that statement and wondered what the motivation was. I have called a lot of clinics and never heard a statement like that. I had talked with a lot of doctors and had never really heard many physicians talk like that.

The pituitary fossa is a dark and dangerous place for even a small tumor. Psychiatrists are generally familiar with the area because of patients with microadenomas that have been discov­ered during evaluations for what is usually hyperprolactinemia secondary to D2 receptor antagonists. In Linda's situation it was a 1.3 cm diameter cystic lesion that involved the cavernous portion of the right carotid artery. The surgery involves a transnasal and transsphenoidal approach to remove the tumor through an endoscope. Cutting into the carotid artery is a potential catastrophe. Damaging the pituitary and needing lifelong hormone supplementation was also a possible outcome. We wanted the best neurosurgeon for the job.

I had just finished reading a NEJM article on robotic surgery that suggested that surgeons need to do 150-200 procedures with this device to be proficient. There was no data available for endoscopic transsphenoidal tumor resections, much less what might be reasonable stratifications like size and type. I figured that the surgeon doing the most was probably the best bet.

At Mayo we were given a timely appointment and met the surgeon. He was confident, detail oriented and personable.

He assured us that his goal was to cure Linda, but that he was not going to trade off safety at any point for a cure. He openly acknowledged the potential problem of the carotid artery being involved with the tumor.

He performed the surgery and the next day came by to explain the results. They were uniformly good but would need confirmatory IGF levels at 3 months. He carefully explained the possible post op complications, how long we had to look for them, and exactly what to do about them. He told me that if any­thing happened during recovery and I was not at the hospital, I would be called immediately. At the time of discharge, he said that he was available through the hospital operator, and that if we called from a cell phone we might have to pull over and wait for him to call back.

While all of this was going on, I learned from other health care providers in the state that the "Mayo Clinic option" was being eliminated from some employee health plans. I had just spoken with a local expert in health economics who said that this suggestion had been made in the past and plan subscribers had rejected it. I thought about the implications for all of the free market and "quality" hyperbole that we hear from politi­cians and business leaders. If we have the best neurosurgical service in the country, why are health plans limiting access to it? If it is the best on a competitive quality basis, why aren't they rewarded rather than being penalized by the market? Most of all, what are the implications for the most heavily rationed health care, namely mental health care?

From a quality perspective, I was hard pressed to think of the best psychiatric service in the state, and not because we lack great psychiatrists. Most of the ·inpatient units I know of are pretty intolerable places. The emphasis is largely to put the patient on medications and discharge them as soon as pos­sible, even when many are highly symptomatic. By comparison with medicine and surgery services, it is difficult to consider this as even a minimal standard of care. Imagine the patient with congestive heart failure being placed on medications and discharged, and making it the family's responsibility to monitor the response and adjust cardiac medications. Imagine me doing post operative neuro checks and monitoring urine volumes, labs, and pain medications on my wife in a Rochester hotel room. In either example, medicine and surgery patients are more likely to follow recommended discharge instructions compared with over half of discharged psychiatric patients not recognizing that they are ill.

What about actual time spent with a psychiatrist? The time that my wife and I spent with her neurosurgeon probably exceeded the time that many hospitalized patients see their psychiatrist. Inpatient settings are usually very poor work environments for psychiatrists because the central fact is that it is no longer an environment where high quality work can be done. Unlike our neurosurgeon, psychiatrists have been mar­ginalized to the role of medication prescribers in both inpatient and outpatient settings. In many inpatient settings psychiatrists no longer control crucial discharge decisions.

When I walked out of the hospital with Linda, we were hope­ful that she had been cured. We knew what we needed to look out for and that there were future options. I noticed that the hospital looked like most of the teaching hospitals I had worked at in the past. There was no valet parking, massage or aroma therapy, harpsichord player, or high-end coffee shop. There were 19 plaques on the wall showing that Mayo Clinic Neurology and Neurosurgery was ranked #1 in the country for each of the past 19 years by US News and World Report. But most of all, we knew that we had just encountered medical and hospital staff with a high degree of expertise and professionalism and that there was an administration supportive of their efforts.

We need to get that back in psychiatry.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplementary 1:

Since writing this I read Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm. In it he describes how modern technology has reduced the risk of neurosurgery but not eliminated it and how even operations that seem to have gone well can have catastrophic results.

 

The Best Advice I Got In Medical School

It has been a long time but when you get to be an old man you can obsess about what you currently know, what you used to know, and how you got here.  I got some life-changing advice as an undergrad but not much good advice in medical school or residency. I can say without a doubt, the best advice I got was:

“If you are sure you are going into psychiatry, take as many medical electives as you can. Don’t take any psychiatry electives because you will be doing that for the rest of your life.”

I did not have to think too much about it because I enjoyed most aspects of medical education and training. The only two negative rotations I had in my training were based primarily on the staffing patterns at the time and they were not major medical or surgical rotations. They also did not seem to be very interesting. Practically all of the medical and surgical residents I worked with were outstanding in many ways. I felt like an integral part of the team and I was happy to do the necessary work.

As a result of the advice I took endocrinology, cardiology, renal medicine, allergy and immunology, neurology, infectious disease, and neurosurgery in addition to the required general medicine rotations. I took a little flak from the Dean. There was some concern that there were not that many spaces available in medical electives. At one point it was suggested that I should limit myself to two or three medical electives. I prevailed and got what I wanted largely because the specific rotations were at a public hospital and the local VA hospital. 

One of the aspects of medical training that is not discussed enough is camaraderie. When you are a medical student, your role is often ill-defined. The role generally depends on the staff you are working with, the institution, and the general culture within the medical school. At the hospitals where I spent most of my time medical students were an integral part of the team. On day one – you are assigned patients and admissions. You were expected to report on patient progress and write progress notes. You learn communicate with everybody in the hierarchy ranging from the intern to the resident to the attending physician. You are supposed to learn how to research and study the specific problems that your patients had and in some cases do a special report. Examples would include a chart review I did on gram-negative meningitis at the VA medical center and presentation on anaphylaxis on my allergy rotation at Milwaukee County Hospital. Both of those studies went extremely well.

But camaraderie is more than knowing the chain of command, hospital systems, and how to get the work done. A key component is the educational quest that everyone is on. Doing rounds with five or six different people at all levels of training ranging from novice to world expert is experience that you don’t get in many places. Some of the results can be stunning. I did a consult on a patient with possible spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (SBP). I wrote up the consult form and prepared to present to the attending physician that afternoon. When he walked in the room from about 10 feet away, he asked everyone else on the team what the problem was with the patient’s leg. I had been focused on abdominal, systemic, and laboratory findings. Nobody could answer the question. The attending physician who happened to be an expert in streptococcal infections, pointed to a rosy rash on the patient’s left shin and suggested that it was a form of streptococcal cellulitis. He did the necessary tests to confirm that diagnosis at his lab.  One of the many processes that must be attended to in these rounds is the pattern matching aspects of diagnosis. It was vaguely implicit in my training and I realized only later when teaching a course in avoiding diagnostic errors - that these rounds are the place to ask experts: “What are you seeing that nobody else is?” All experts including psychiatrists recognize certain patterns and can make more rapid and more accurate diagnoses than people outside their specialty.

A lot of people reading this may have a hard time believing that what you learned in medical school is relevant to a specialty that you practice your entire life. After all - aren’t these specialties updated at some point and doesn’t your knowledge base become dated? It is surprising how the basic approach to the patient that is unique to each specialty does not change much. There is still relevant review of systems, specialty specific diagnoses, and laboratory testing. Working with specialists for even a month gives medical students and residents a clear idea of how to approach patient problems in a systematic manner. Even though there have been radical changes in some specialties like cardiology, most medical specialties change slowly at the mechanistic level typically with some pharmacological innovation. A clear example relevant to psychiatrists is the endocrinology of metabolic syndrome and diabetes mellitus. Over the course of my career that has resulted in increasingly complex pharmacotherapy ranging from insulin, metformin, and sulfonylureas to an additional five classes of drugs and more complicated insulin preparations.

A unifying concept that I learned on all those medicine specialty rotations is that it is important to still know about these mechanisms and medications even if your specialty involves another bodily system and you are prescribing an additional treatment. No matter what specialty service I was on there was never the idea that we could focus only on a specific bodily system and ignore the rest. On all of those rotations including neurosurgery, I was often the person focused on what was going on with the patient’s brain.

Learning medicine and neurosurgery on all of these rotations was quite exciting. I am much more likely to retain information if I am excited about it. I was excited right up until 11 PM on the last day of medical school.  I was doing renal medicine at the time and the senior resident was going to be a rheumatology fellow. We finished rounding about 6 PM and he noticed we had 4 or 5 additional consults. He was the kind of guy that you really like working with. He had a great sense of humor and was always engaging. He could even engage an introvert like me. I remember him saying: “Look I know - this is your last day but you could really help us out by doing some of these these consults. The new team is coming in tomorrow and I don’t want to leave all of these consults behind.” He threw in a couple of politically incorrect jokes for good measure and I headed off to do two consults. We came back and met with the attending physician who was considerably older than I am right now and finished them all by 11 PM. I really did not want to say goodbye to that team. But I headed off by foot across the golf course sized county hospital grounds to my apartment on 89^th St.

The knowledge gained in that fourth year of medical school was a springboard for the next 30 years. I continue to read about all those medical specialties and remember what happened in 1982. I continue to research all the medical problems and medicines that my patients are taking. I continue to wish at times that I was still on that renal medicine team back at Milwaukee County Hospital.

I didn’t get a lot of good advice in medical school but for all those reasons the advice about what to do in my fourth year was the best.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA





Supplementary 1:

Second best piece of advice in med school was from the head of our Biochemistry class in the first year.  Our biochemistry class consisted of lectures and research seminars where we read and critiqued biochemistry research. At one of the first lectures, the department head stated:

"Subscribe to the New England Journal of Medicine and read it."

I have been reading it ever since and that was definitely a good idea.


Supplementary 2:

I did take one psychiatry elective in the last two years of med school - Infant Development and Psychotherapy.  It was taught by two psychiatrists who were very excited about the field Frank Johnson, MD and Jerry Dowling, MD - both Medical College of Wisconsin psychiatrists. We screened infants and very young children at risk especially if they had one or both parents with severe mental illness. We instructed parents on how to interact with their children in order to overcome behavioral difficulties associated with disruption of the infant or child and parental bond.  Every week we had a research seminar where we read relevant papers on the subject.  We had a very large clinic where we did evaluations and saw large groups of parents. It was a very positive experience and has implications to this day.  As far as I know there are no clinics in the US like the one we had in 1982.  It provided a valuable service to infants, young children, and their families.

1: Wesner D, Dowling J, Johnson F. What is maternal-infant intervention? The role of infant psychotherapy. Psychiatry. 1982 Nov;45(4):307-15. PubMed PMID: 7146225.

There Is No Identity Crisis in Psychiatry

The New England Journal of Medicine published an opinion in their October 31, 2019 edition titled “Medicine and the Mind-The Consequences of Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis” (1).  Claiming that psychiatry (meaning organized psychiatry and all psychiatrists) has some sort of an identity crisis is a favorite editorial topic these days. It lacks face validity considering over 40,000 psychiatrists go to work every day, have working alliances with their patients, treat problems that no other doctors want to treat, and get results. Furthermore, most psychiatrists are working in toxic practice environments that were designed by business administrators and politicians. As a result, psychiatrists are expected to see large numbers of patients for limited periods of time and spend additional hours performing tasks that are basically designed by business administrators and politicians and have no clinical value.

The authors in this case fail to see that problem. In their first paragraph they critique “checklist amalgamations of symptoms” as if that is psychiatric practice or what psychiatrists are trained to do in their residency programs. I happen to be an expert in these checklists because I have been critiquing them from the outset. The state of Minnesota mandates that all patients being treated for depression in primary care settings have to be rated on these checklists over time, and that data is supposedly analyzed as a quality marker. Anyone familiar with the analysis of longitudinal data will realize that cross-sectional data points on different patients at different points in time are meaningless. But that doesn’t prevent politicians in Minnesota from dictating psychiatric practice and it doesn’t prevent these authors from blaming psychiatry for it.

Their additional opening critique on “medication management” ignores the fact that this procedure was invented by the federal government. This procedure and all the associated billing codes did not exist in psychiatry until HCFA thought it was a good idea to assign these codes to psychiatrists and call them “medication management”. It was only recently that psychiatry could use the same E & M codes that the rest of medicine uses for the provision of complicated care including psychotherapy. Instead of just stating that the authors say “We are facing the stark limitations of biological treatments, while finding less and less time to work with patients on difficult problems”.  Apart from the rhetoric I don’t know what that means. If I have a patient with a difficult problem - I make the time to work on it.  If there were any stark limitations in psychiatry – they occurred before the invention of biological treatments. In those days, people died from severe psychiatric disorders and the associated effects of severe hyperactivity, starvation, and dehydration.  Many people also had their lives disrupted when they were sent to state mental hospitals for years or in some cases decades.  Those were the historic limitations in psychiatry.

They move onto a critique about diagnosis and their opinion that “the solution to psychological problems involves matching the “right” diagnosis with the “right” medication". I don’t know where the authors went to psychiatry school but that is a new one on me.  At a different point in their opinion piece they critique the current diagnostic manual. If they read that manual they would notice there are conditions with strictly psychological and social etiologies that do not require medical treatment. They also minimize the role of tertiary consultants like myself. I see thousands of people who were started on psychiatric medications by non-psychiatrists. There is clearly a lack of expertise prescribing those medications and I make the necessary adjustments including stopping medications that were inappropriately prescribed. I also prescribe the indicated treatment when it was never provided in the first place. That all happens in the context of a therapeutic relationship and providing necessary psychotherapy.

Somehow the authors conclude that a lack of “scientific and intellectual integrity” does a disservice to patients, practicing psychiatrists, and medical colleagues. They suggest that medical colleagues are striving to provide the best possible and “most humane care to people with medically and psychologically complicated conditions”. I don’t know who the authors think is holding up the psychiatric and psychological end of that treatment. I worked in a multidisciplinary clinic with every imaginable consultant for 22 years. Nobody hesitated to refer patients to me for psychiatric care. They knew it would be comprehensive, that the assessment would be exhaustive, and that the treatment plan would be beneficial. We also had an active consultation-liaison team that provided active ongoing consultation to a large medical-surgical hospital. Without those psychiatric services there is no “humane care” to the medically complex psychiatric patient. This psychiatric function is widely known and these treatment plans can be read directly from the pages of the NEJM.

The authors provide a one sentence sketch of brain function and how the external world affects our “brain-minds”. They grudgingly acknowledge that basic science may be a necessity. They bemoan the fact that advances in neuroscience “are still far from offering real help to real people in hospital, clinic, and consulting room”.  That is not what I observed in 35 years of practice. There has been a steady improvement in psychopharmacology both in terms of safety and selectivity. There have been major advances in neuromodulation -both electroconvulsive therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation. There have been pharmacological advances in addiction psychiatry with more medication assisted treatments. There have been advances in specific conditions like severe psychiatric disorders associated with pregnancy and various forms of catatonia. The diagnostic advances related to basic science research have been stunning. When I first started consulting in nursing homes 35 years ago - every diagnosis was either “senility”, “senile dementia”, or “atherosclerosis”. There were no science-based diagnoses of dementia in those days. We currently have a comprehensive approach to detailed dementia diagnoses as well as a comprehensive approach to diagnosing 127 different conditions associated with substance use disorders all neatly detailed in the diagnostic manual that they seem to have a problem with. Hopefully there is no more “senility” in nursing homes.

The authors attack neuroscience in the usual ways. They state they agree that discoveries in neuroscience are exciting but on the other hand “are still far from offering real help to real people in the hospital, clinic, and consulting room.” They restate that twice in the space of this brief essay. Is that true?  Some reading in the area of translational psychiatry might be in order. Every week I assess many patients for anxiety disorders. A significant number of them have been anxious their entire life. There are currently no good conceptualizations and indicated treatments that separate this group from people who develop anxiety later in life. From the work of Kalin and others (3,4), the biological basis of anxious temperament and potential solutions to lifelong anxiety is now becoming a possibility. Progress in neuroscience has gone from receptors and neuroendocrinology in the 1980s to genetics and multiomics in the 21^st century. Now there is more than speculation and empirical trials. Entire mechanisms that include genetics, transcription, anatomic substrate and the impact of the environment on brain systems are determined.

There is in fact a group dedicated to bringing neuroscience into the clinical realm – The National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative. It is possible to think of a neuroscience-based formulation as easily as one might think of a psychodynamic formulation.  The point of neuroscience research in psychiatry is the same as it is in any other specialty with one exception - the organ being studied is more complex and generates a conscious state. The basic science of practically every other field has been studied more intensely and with more resources than brain science has been studied. Many other fields have not produced miracle cures when it comes to chronic illnesses and the basic treatments of these illnesses have been static for decades. The cures or disease altering interventions often occur after much more time has been spent studying them then we have spent studying the brain. In that context, basic science brain research is as on track as any other field

The most erroneous opinion advanced by these authors is that psychiatry has somehow abandoned the social and psychological elements of care. They cite an author who is a historian and who suggests that psychiatrists should limit their scope to “severe, mostly psychotic disorders”. There are many authors with similar irrelevant opinions about psychiatry but they generally aren’t quoted in an opinion piece for the NEJM. Nothing that author says is realistic or accurate in this article, but that is typical of the so-called critics of psychiatry. The authors own proposals for change in psychiatry are similarly irrelevant because it is apparent that they have a limited understanding of what is going on in the field or what psychiatrists do on a day-to-day basis.

The next section of their opinion piece is about funding and how biological funding has “replaced all other forms of psychiatric research”. They provide no evidence in terms of actual numbers. I expended some effort to try to do that.  I asked NIH, NIMH, SAMHSA, one of my US Senators and I tweeted the director of the NIMH to get an answer to the question about the proportion of funding for basic science versus psychosocial mental health research. I also searched the AAAS research reports to see if anything was listed there. What I got back was largely devoid of any useful data.  The above links were sent to me by a public affairs specialist at the NIH.   

I remembered reading about an analysis in American Psychologist suggesting that 30% of the $1.6B NIMH budget goes to psychosocial research. I was able to find the article (2) and it was not straightforward as most advocates of increased psychosocial research think. That 30% figure comes from a graphic generated by a review of research abstracts of 15% (2,028) of all funded studies from 1997-2015. They were coded on a 1 - 5 scale by doctoral level students where 1 = entirely focused on biomedical topics to 5 = entirely focused on psychosocial topics.  There was a positive trend in favor of biomedical research but the authors point out several limitations in the data and areas for further study. And they make this important comment:

“A test of the differences in regression slopes indicated that there was, however, no difference in the increase in award size for R01 grants, F(1,475) = 3.97, p = ns, suggesting that the proportion of biomedical grants awarded increased, but they did not receive disproportionately larger awards than psychosocial grants. This is notable given that biomedical research is often more costly because of expensive procedures and larger research teams.” (p. 417-418)

This reference provides a very balanced look at the issue including a discussion of the significant limitations of psychosocial treatments - something that you do not see in the NEJM piece or from the people claiming that basic science research is clinically worthless. 

Although the authors are critical of neuroscience results, they don’t seem to mention the lack of innovation in psychotherapy and other psychosocial therapies. More significantly they ignore the fact that these therapies are routinely not funded by managed-care companies, government insurers, and responsible counties. They blame psychiatry for the “abandonment and incarceration of people with chronic, severe mental illness” when in fact the necessary psychiatric beds and inpatient facilities as well as community housing for these patients has been actively shut down by businesses and governments over the past 30 years.  It seems that counties have adapted managed-care practices that includes rationing services for the chronically mentally ill to the point that they end up in jail. The authors seem to conveniently blame psychiatry for that. Once again they could read about what psychiatry really does in the pages of the NEJM and how these very patients are served by ACT teams. The treatment approach was invented to improve the quality of life of people with chronic mental illness and support them in independent living. It does not work in a vacuum and there has to be a funding source.

The authors suggest that psychiatry needs to be “rebuilt”. From their suggestions about training programs I wonder if they participate in training programs, teach residents, and work on resident curricula.  And if they do - I wonder what that training program looks like. I say that because all the suggestions they have seem to have been in place for decades. In fact, their entire argument is reminiscent of the old "biological psychiatry versus the therapists" argument from about 1984. That argument should stay firmly planted in the "old history" folder.

Their concluding paragraph is a extension of earlier rhetoric.  They talk about psychiatry having an exclusive focus on “biological structure” rather than meeting the needs of real people. I go to work every day and talk to real people all day long. I know quite a lot about the biological structure the brain and its function. I must because I don’t want to be treating a stroke, brain tumor, a traumatic brain injury, or multiple sclerosis like a purely psychiatric problem. I also realize that if I conceptualize the psychiatric disorder as a specific brain area or network - that is still occurring in a unique conscious state. That conscious state is generated by the most complex organ in the body. It is an organ with tremendous computational power. All psychiatrists are treating people with unique conscious states and there is no specialty more aware of that. And in that complex setting psychiatrists are focused on helping the people they are seeing. They are the only ones accountable.

There is no “identity crisis” in psychiatry. Making that claim requires a suspension of the reality about how psychiatrists are trained and the grim practice environments that many of us face. Those grim practice environments are the direct result of governments and businesses actively discriminating against psychiatrists and their patients. That has resulted in discrimination that is so gross that county jails are now regarded as the largest psychiatric hospitals in the USA.  Pretending that these problems are the result some flaw in psychiatrists one of the greatest medical myths of the 21^st century.  These authors and the New England Journal of Medicine are promoting it.  This opinion piece is so poorly done it makes me wonder what the editorial staff at NEJM are doing. It is as bad as another opinion piece that should never have been published in the psychiatric literature.   

The real message from the profession that should be out there is:

“Give us a practice environment where we can do what we are trained to do! Get out of the way and let us do our work! Give us the resources that every other medical specialist has!”

Very few of those environments exist.  They have been rationed out of existence by politicians, bureaucrats and administrators.  People who know nothing about the field seem to be totally unaware of that problem and like these authors they never comment on it. Only people lacking that awareness would believe an article like this - or write it.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

References:

1: Gardner C, Kleinman A. Medicine and the Mind - The Consequences of Psychiatry's Identity Crisis. N Engl J Med. 2019 Oct 31;381(18):1697-1699. doi:10.1056/NEJMp1910603. PubMed PMID: 31665576.

2: Teachman BA, McKay D, Barch DM, Prinstein MJ, Hollon SD, Chambless DL. How psychosocial research can help the National Institute of Mental Health achieve its grand challenge to reduce the burden of mental illnesses and psychological disorders. Am Psychol. 2019 May-Jun;74(4):415-431. doi: 10.1037/amp0000361. Epub 2018 Sep 27. PubMed PMID: 30265019.  

I thank these authors for making this paper available on ResearchGate.

3: Kalin NH. Mechanisms underlying the early risk to develop anxiety and depression: A translational approach. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2017 Jun;27(6):543-553. Doi: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2017.03.004. Epub 2017 May 11. Review. PubMed PMID: 28502529; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5482756.

4: Fox AS, Kalin NH. A translational neuroscience approach to understanding the development of social anxiety disorder and its pathophysiology. Am J Psychiatry. 2014 Nov 1;171(11):1162-73. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2014.14040449. Review. PubMed PMID: 25157566; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4342310.



Supplementary:

The Psychiatry Milestone Project: an indication of what psychiatry residents are evaluated on in their training programs. Link.

Graphic Credit: 

The graphic was downloaded from Shutterstock per their standard user agreement.

What Do Surgeons and Psychiatrists Have In Common? - Dread

I have had two surgeries this summer that have really impacted my work and daily life.  I only consent to surgery if it is a problem severe enough that I can't function or will kill me and the first one was for that.  I found a highly skilled surgeon who had done more of the procedures than occur in most countries in the world.  The procedure itself seemed to go surprisingly well. He gave me a prescription for oxycodone but the only treatment I needed for post op pain was acetaminophen.

I went in to see him a month later and everything was still going very well. No surgical complications and the target symptoms were in good remission. I did well for another 2 weeks and then got symptomatic again.  I was reexamined and the original surgery had scarred over requiring a second surgery to remove the scar tissue. He explained that is was very rare in his practice for that to happen, but that he did need to fix is as soon as possible.  The second surgery as done and I was functioning as good as new again.  He advised me to come back in 6 months for follow up.

There were post operative complications.  Despite antibiotic prophylaxis given during surgery I developed an infection with a fever and tachycardia.  He prescribed antibiotics but it got worse. I eventually went into the emergency department at midnight and was given intravenous Rocephin and told to continue the oral antibiotics until they were gone.  The infection cleared up in about 5 days.

I did very well and then at the 6 week mark again, I got progressively symptomatic and called the surgeon again:

Me:  "The symptoms are back, at about the same time frame and course of onset as they were in the past. Do I need surgery again?"

Surgeon: "Well probably.  It is highly unusual that it happened the first time and even more unusual if this has happened again.  I will just schedule the OR so we can take care of it early next week.  Can you do it then."

Me: "Well yes - I will do whatever I need to do to take care of this problem. I can't really go on like this."

Surgeon:  "I was just talking with my partner here and we need to alter the procedure to really remove more tissue when we take out the scar tissue this time. We really need to open that area up"

He sounded a little shaken. He is a top surgeon in his field and this is not just one complication but a second complication of the same initial surgery.  He was consulting his colleague and in this group all of the surgeons are very experienced and highly regarded. I wondered if he was concerned about what I was thinking?  He was safe there - even though it is practically an American standard to blame surgeons for sub-optimal outcomes that was never going to happen. I have seen surgeons with less skill than others and I picked him because of his record. There was no way that I was not going to let him do his job or suggest that I was in any way dissatisfied with his work.

I started to think about all of my years in acute care and how common it was to walk in the door in the morning and get blamed for everything by people who I have never seen before.  People who were there because they were in an alcohol or drug induced state and ended up under my care because there were unsafe and needed to be detoxified and in some cases treated for the psychiatric complications of substance use. People who were admitted for severe psychiatric disorders and associated aggressive or suicidal behavior.  Once they learned I was their psychiatrist - it was my fault that they were there - even though it was my job to get them out of there as soon as possible. My failure to do that resulted in a second tier of blame.  This time by hospital administrators who were often quite aggressive in encouraging me to get patients out of the hospital whether I though they were stable or not.  Shortly before I left the job, one of them actually told me that if I did not get the patient out - he would come down and discharge the patient himself.

I smiled to myself at that point and realized it was a very good thing that I was not blaming my surgeon for anything.

And then I thought about being in the same situation. Most people who have not practiced in acute care have not seen some of the problems that have no solutions.  Aggressive behavior that does not respond to medications.  Catatonic behavior that rapidly leads to life threatening dehydration or starvation.  Bipolar patients on dialysis who are delirious for months waiting for kidney transplants.  Patients with multiple medical complications who are agitated and can't sleep.  On some days an endless list of problems that would keep me up all night long trying to figure out solutions.  I would call and email one of three colleagues who I knew I could count on. They had been working acute care as long as me and I always appreciate their input. We only consulted one another in situations where we had no obvious solutions and we also had a sense of dread. Dread in the sense that you start to ask yourself: "Is there really no solution here? What am I missing? Have I lost it? Do I need to take a break and work somewhere else for awhile?"

There were a lot of nights where I would just lay in bed, thinking about the situation - sensing the blood pulsate throughout my body and feeling a light sweat on my skin. I would get out of bed in the morning amped up on adrenaline and feeling like I had slept for 8 hours when it was probably closer to 1 or 2.

Luckily in my case, there was resolution.  It could happen after a couple of sleepless nights. On many of those nights I would have contact with the nursing staff to see if any modifications could be done while I was away.  I would finally get a break and things would be all right for 2-4 weeks before another crisis hit. It would usually be a surprise. I walk into the unit in the morning and hear "Mr/Mrs Smith is up out of bed eating this morning.  They made a big turnaround last night."

Hoping for that break is the only thing that kept me going. You can only tell yourself that you have done everything right for so long. I never got to the point where I expected that break. It always struck me as very lonely and bleak. My senses seem dulled and everything slowed down around that problem. When the break happened - life was finally good again.

I was able to step back from these associations and realize that my surgeon was likely experiencing some of the dread I typically encountered in acute care.  Despite extended and best efforts - things are not going well and you don't really know why. There are no easy or apparent solutions.

Surgeon: "I should probably see you tomorrow before the surgery. I am sorry this happened. Can you be there are 7:30?"

Me: "Thanks. Yeah I can be there at 7:30.  See you then."

I was very calm and I slept well that night.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA





Image Credit:

1.  Above image as my second preop identification and allergy band.

2.  Image for Twitter post was from Shutterstock per their standard agreement by Francey Scary Foggy Road downloaded on 10/14/2018. 

Basic Models

In order to bring some clarity into the discussion of why neuroscience is important for psychiatrists, I thought I would get back to the basics.  I have three models in the above graphic that I think represent the basic conceptualizations of the brain in my lifetime.  They are very basic models, but I think reasonable jumping off points for further discussion.  They also serve to make my point about the importance of neuroscience.  I realize that there is a natural human tendency to be argumentative.  When I mention neuroscience or even science it seems that many psychiatrists and interestingly their detractors both get irritated.  I can understand why the detractors are irritated since many of them are at the level of Black Box thinking in the above diagram.  I will elaborate further, but many of them seem to consider the brain an amalgam of various qualities that either defy understanding or are unnecessary to understand because the brain may be involved at the very periphery of human behavior if at all.  But I don't understand any attitude on the part of brain professionals like psychiatrists that doubt the importance of neuroscience. With that let me proceed with the three levels of thought about the brain in the above diagram.

The Black Box embodies what people have thought about the brain since the beginning of time.  The brain is a mystery on the one hand and immutable on the other.  The reality of that situation could not be denied for long.  It was obvious that people with clear brain damage who survived the initial insult could have a number of changes in cognition, personality, and social behavior.  The black box view eventually gave way to mind-body dualism that held there were a number of mental phenomenon that could not be explained  by physical properties alone.  That is really the last refuge of the Black Box and that is that the conscious human state has not been explained in terms of how it arises from the neural correlates of consciousness.  It is an active area of research in the Clear Box area today.  It is always interesting in terms of who adheres to Black Box thinking these days.  I can't think of any legitimate science that occurs using this model.  Pre-modern and modern neuroscience if anything has clearly dispelled black box and most mind-body duality.  Some philosophers and antipsychiatrists are at this level.

In the Grey Box Box things got clearer.  The transition from Black to Grey to Clear is not a well defined boundary.  The best example that I can think of is German neuropsychiatry at the beginning of the 20th century.  Much of that movement was focused in asylums.  There is a famous picture of giants in the field like Kraepelin. Alzheimer, Nissl, Binswanger and others who were active at the time.  These psychiatrists made good phenomenological observations but they were also focused on gross neuroanatomy.  In the case of some illnesses like Alzheimer disease some observations could be made at autopsy.  In the case of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, gross anatomical changes were not evident.  Although that is a negative finding. it is a finding that propelled a century of more sophisticated neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and the beginnings of a much more sophisticated molecular  biological approach to functional mental illnesses or illnesses with no gross anatomical or physiological markers.

While neuroscience was moving forward at a slow pace, there was some slight progress on the fronts of diagnosis and treatment.  The DSM is always a controversial document, largely because there is never any shortage of self-proclaimed experts in psychiatry.  Psychiatrists know the limitations, what can be tested for, what physical illnesses are important to rule out, and what states can be cause by drug or alcohol intoxication, chronic use and withdrawal.  These medical and intoxicant induced states are all clear medical illnesses by any definition as well as the associated syndromes.  There is a disclaimer in the DSM about who should be using it.  Training is required to conduct the appropriate evaluations and make the appropriate diagnosis.  Further training is required to assure that patients can be safely treated.  Associated medical conditions need to be recognized and diagnosed.  All of this came about as a result of a medical focus that was reemphasized with the advent of the DSM.  Prior to that there was an overemphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.  A darker Grey Box consisted of a brain full of psychoanalytic constructs and the diagnosis and treatment was overly dependent on this model.

DSM technology was a required step in refocusing psychiatry on medicine and the brain as an organ.  But that occurred 40 years ago.  During that time, psychiatrists diagnoses and treat people based on clinical experience and general patterns that they recognize in the course of their training and practice.  In some cases the DSM has very clear criteria that are very helpful - like the definition of a manic episode.  In other cases - like the difference between anxiety and depression there are problems.  The same patients can endorse predominately anxious symptoms one week and predominately depressive symptoms the next.  The severity of the illness can typically lead to a clearer diagnosis and that is most likely due to the fact that the boundary between a clinical case and normal is arbitrarily defined as impairment in functioning.  More impairment should lead to clearer diagnosis.  Better markers to classify illness and hopefully predict treatment response are needed.  The search for these markers is an active area of investigation.  Psychiatry will remain in the Grey Box without these markers and more clear-cut treatments that address the underlying biological changes.

A lot of pharmacological research was done during the DSM era.  There was a lot of discussion about neurotransmitter and receptor pharmacology and the implications for scientific treatment.  Like all science, receptor pharmacology and post synaptic cell signalling mechanisms do not stand still.  There are many theories of receptor and drug pharmacology that have stood the test of time.  With a focus on the pathological nobody could hope that drugs that were often accidentally discovered would lead to highly effective treatments or a more comprehensive theory of mental illness or normal brain  function.  Clinical trials of psychiatric drugs and studies of pharmacology and physiology are are also limited by research subject heterogeneity.  That is a problem with research on any complex polygenic illness.  In the case of pure mental  illness where any medical cause has been ruled out, the DSM criteria alone are a poor filter for selecting homogeneous populations for research.

Drug and psychotherapy research in the Grey Box have both suffered from treatments being applied to heterogeneous populations.  There is no researcher that I know who thinks that any two people with a DSM diagnosis are similar to the point that drug or medication response would be high or necessarily reproducible.  Apart from the diagnostic problem, the DSM suggests homogeneity in a context where any seasoned clinician knows differently.

The Clear Box is the goal here.  The knowledge needed to get to this box is much more comprehensive.  It recognizes brain complexity and the importance of the conscious state rather than just a collection of DSM descriptors. Despite the fact that many of the basic mechanisms were elucidated over 40 years ago neuroscience has detractors just like psychiatry.  A common strategy of neuroscience detractors is to take either a research finding or a media quote and "debunk" it with fanfare in the popular media.  Ulterior motives are often suggested for connecting neuroscience primarily with psychiatric disorders.  Many of these detractors depend on their own characterization of the original research and the cultural phenomenon of piling on with negative criticism to score what appears to be a victory with the vocal and like minded.  They use the same strategy in claiming that mental illness or addictions are "not diseases" like "real" diseases - despite the fact that the general population considers them to be equivalent.  I find nothing compelling about critiques of ongoing science and medicine by the unqualified.  The main problem is that the people truly qualified to produce the criticism are ignored in favor of what amounts to unscientific criticism.  There is a secondary problem with the proliferation of journals, especially opinion pieces rather than scientific papers.  
                                   
Another interesting thought that I had about the Clear Box is that many people have no difficulty at all in recognizing that machine intelligence is improving and that at some point it might exceed human intelligence.  They don't seem to have any problem in figuring out whether a computer may have negotiated the Turing Test and seem indistinguishable from another human being.  Many people seem to have difficulty recognizing the computational capacity of the human brain and the result of that complexity.  Despite some philosophical arguments - that is a possible reason for not seeing the Clear Box as the preferred state of brain knowledge.

I have tried to point out many times that one key element of the  mischaracterization of neuroscience in psychiatry is a basic lack of understanding of science.  Science is a process and a dialogue.  Medical science is more of a process and a dialogue than physical science - the processes involved are more complicated and the experiments involve proportionally fewer relevant variables.  There are no differential equations based on a few variables that explain how the brain works.  Entire blocks of research can end up partially true or a dead end.  That does not mean there is some grand conspiracy - that just means it is time to move on to a new paradigm.  

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA



Quotation Credit:

"The brain is the most complex object in the known universe" is a quote from Christof Koch, Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and well-known consciousness researcher.


Tip For The Better Graphic:

The graphic at the top is rendered with Visio.  Blogger makes it blurry and ill defined.  Click on it for the sharp Visio version.

National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative - a brighter future for psychiatry

As any reader of this blog probably knows, I am a big proponent of neuroscience education for psychiatrists and always have been.  I have suggested in the past that it would take broad collaboration.  I posted some examples of an NIMH initiative on neuroscience  education.  I teach neuroscience (also known as neurobiology) myself and that has led me to be acutely aware of the lack of educational resources on the field.  That background is what has made this the happiest day at a CME conference that I have ever spent.  I am currently at the University of Wisconsin 4th Annual Update and Advances In Psychiatry - a conference that has really been in place for the past 41 years.  After watching a comprehensive update on eating disorders I settled in to listen to Melissa Arbuckle, MD, PhD; Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Director of Residency Training; Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center.  The title of her presentation was Discussing the Neuroscience of Mental Illness with Your Patients.  I turned to the section in the syllabus and there was one page with a case report on the front and a crude drawing of the brain (two views) on the back.  Being a traditional conference guy who likes a ton of technical information, no audience participation, and no role playing - I was prepared to be disappointed.

I was not prepared for what would transpire in the next 90 minutes.  I have posted here many times why I thought that every psychiatrist should know neuroscience and ways to do it, specifically the need for widespread collaboration due to a lack pf neuroscience manpower in most departments.  Dr.  Arbuckle started out explaining what the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative was.  It was started by a collaboration of like minded residency directors  to come up with a program to teach neuroscience to psychiatry residents.  She showed the explosion in neuroscience papers in psychiatry just over the past decade.  She referred to an article in JAMA Psychiatry (1) with her collaborators on why neuroscience needs to be integrated into psychiatry right now.  She discussed the New York Times editorial that showed up three weeks later with the criticism of their viewpoint (2).  Although she did not mention it, like a lot of articles it as written from the perspective of a psychiatric identity crisis.  Whenever I see that term it seems like the authors are firmly behind the curve and don't seem to understand what neuroscience encompasses.  Dr. Arbuckle said that the article was critical of the criticism that the brain was the basis of human behavior.  Quoting the article:

"Indeed an article in May in one of the most respected journals in our field JAMA Psychiatry echoed this view: "The diseases we treat are diseases of the brain."........ Even if this premise were true - and many would consider it reductionist and simplistic - an undertaking as ambitious as unraveling the function of the brain would likely take many years."  The author is a psychiatrist and goes on to say that he is all for neuroscience and even talks about some recent research techniques he (implicitly) just doesn't think psychiatrists should study it?  He also seems to conflate psychotherapy as being independent of neuroscience when in fact we have known just the opposite since since Kandel's 1979 seminal lecture Psychotherapy And The Single Synapse.  

I am equally incredulous when people seem to argue about the importance of neuroscience in psychiatry.  I find reductionism and reductionist approaches to be perfectly understandable and acceptable.  It is an interesting form of rhetoric to use these terms pejoratively.  Most people go into medicine because they want to know how things work.  If they did not enter with that goal, it soon becomes apparent that knowing mechanisms whether they are theoretical or not is an important aspect of studying medicine.  Some of the first mechanisms I studied in medical school involved cholera and diphtheria toxin. How is it possible to determine these mechanisms and recent significant epigenetic mechanisms without taking a reductionist approach?

The exercise that Dr. Arbuckle introduced to the audience was the diagnosis and treatment of complex cases.  The case vignette involved a young woman with borderline personality disorder.  The task for the audience was to pair up and role play discussing the relevant neuroscience concepts of treatment with the patient using the brain diagram as an aid.  Eliciting responses from 300 people in a room slows things down.  After the audience was done, she showed a film of an expert presenting this information to a patient and what presentation materials might be available.  It went very well and it presented the rationale for dialectical behavior therapy and not a medication.  It was a clear example of a neuroscience based discussion that provides a rationale for psychotherapy.  There are numerous materials on the web site (9 modules, 56 sessions, 40 authors) and wide scale participation is encouraged.

The information up to that point was quite exciting.  Dr Arbuckle had plenty of enthusiasm in her closing remarks.  In those remarks she pointed out the goal of "getting the entire field up to speed" in neuroscience.  She pointed out that everything on the site is free but at some point they may ask physicians to pay for CME.  She said that she realizes that this is literally "changing the world and that is what we are going to do."        

This was the most exciting commentary from a psychiatrist about teaching the entire field and the future of psychiatry that I have ever heard.  I have never been this impressed by any development in the field during my career.  And I am a psychiatrist who is as pro-neuroscience as anybody.  How is it that I am just hearing about this initiative right now and only because I am attending a conference?  That is why I am posting my experience here and a link to the NNCI web site and materials.

Dr. Arbuckle and her collaborators are one of the few bright spots for the future of psychiatry.

But they are very bright.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA


References:


1:  Ross DA, Travis MJ, Arbuckle MR. The future of psychiatry as clinical neuroscience: why not now? JAMA Psychiatry. 2015 May;72(5):413-4. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.3199. PubMed PMID: 25760896.

2: Friedman RA.  Psychiatry's Identity Crisis.  New York Times July 17, 2015. p SR5.


Attribution: 

The graphics at the top are two slides from one of my lectures.  I like to present data on the unique aspects of every individual brain and why that can happen.  The slides are not from the NNCI program and I am not affiliated with that program.  Click on each slide to enlarge.

Medical Treatment Is Never A Zero Risk Decision

Harvey W. Cushing, MD

Ever since Medical Errors - the Third Leading Cause Of Death came out the media and bloggers have been abuzz with the headline.  It is only a matter of time before we hear about how many full 747s crashing would equal the number of patients that are killed by physician errors each year.  There are any number of articles in the press each day about how there are algorithms or checklists from some committee or government agency that will eliminate risk in medical diagnosis and procedures.  There are an equal number of stories about how machine intelligence or will eliminate all of this human error.  There was a story a few weeks ago about a robot that could suture up operative wounds from surgery.  After seeing that robot in action, I would not want it anywhere near me or anyone I cared about.  There is often palpable conflict of interest involved in the news stories.  Stories designed to generate interest or influence politicians.  Stories to express a political viewpoint.  Even in the professional literature, much of what is written is a political viewpoint often to develop leverage against physicians and force them to do things in a certain way.  The selling point to the public and their elected officials is that medicine, particularly physicians would perform better and more uniformly if they would adhere to certain protocols and that these protocols need to include the input of people who have never been trained as physicians - most notably business managers.          

I can illustrate why these analyses are absurd based on an experience I had about 6 years ago.  At that time my wife was struggling with intense ear pain and the provider she was seeing wanted to start her on another course of antibiotics for ear pain.  I had her see an ENT surgeon instead, who performed an examination that only an ENT physician can do and then read the CT scan that he ordered.  That CT scan was read as normal by the radiologist.  This ENT physician not only read it as abnormal, but got additional imaging studies to demonstrate that my wife had a pituitary tumor.  Referral to an endocrinologist confirmed that it was a growth hormone secreting tumor, further explaining additional symptoms that she had described to various physicians over the years.  I went to work at that point and found the neurosurgeon who was one of the pioneers in transsphenoidal adenoma resections in the world.  Although not malignant, the prognosis of these tumors is not benign with disfigurement from acromegaly, progressive endocrine abnormalities, and eventual congestive heart failure all from the effects of excessive growth hormone secretion.  There were also complications of inadequate excision and secondary procedures like gamma knife irradiation in an attempt to obliterate the tumor.  We were sitting in the consulting room of the neurosurgeon as soon as we could arrange it.

He had pulled up a coronal section of the MRI scan showing the tumor wrapped around my wife's right internal carotid artery.  He made the following statement:  "This is the tumor and this is the artery (pointing to areas on an MRI coronal view of the pituitary gland and surrounding anatomy).  I am going to try to remove as much of the tumor as possible.  If I accidentally nick the carotid artery in this area, there is nothing that can be done about it.  That complication happens and I know good neurosurgeons who have had that happen to them.  I can assure you I will remove only as much tumor as possible.  I will remove only as much as I would remove if you were one of my family members."

This is the unspoken truth about medical errors and whether they are preventable or not.  In this case doing nothing results in an inevitable slow death and severely compromised quality of life.  The procedure is not without risk.  In this case the risk was minimized by selecting the most skilled neurosurgeon in the area, but he openly acknowledges that nicking the carotid artery in a place that cannot be repaired is not only a possibility, but it happens to the best neurosurgeons.  Any cursory analysis should illustrate why.  We are talking about an operation that occurs in about a 1 1/2 inch space at the tip of an endoscope on a tumor that extends away from that tip into a small crevice between the carotid artery and sphenoid bone.  Anyone really interested in this can go to YouTube and view several videos of the procedure from the view of the surgeon.  In this case our neurosurgeon explicitly talked about the issue of how much tumor could be removed.  He was acutely aware that the risk involved in removing too much tumor may be unacceptably high.  Incompletely removing the tumor involves the risk of continued exposure to excessive growth hormone and the secondary gamma knife procedure.     The fact that this surgery can be done at all seems like is a miracle to me.  Early in my  career, I had treated a patient who underwent a transtemporal approach to the same kind of tumor and that had resulted in significant postoperative disability.
                                                               
In the decision to proceed my wife clearly found the risk acceptable because acromegaly and a slow death from endocrine complications and further procedures were not.  The operative procedure went perfectly and 6 years later her growth hormone, IGH levels, and serial MRI scans show no tumor recurrence.  I don't have to speculate about what might have gone wrong in my wife's case because Henry Marsh (6) writes about it in his compilation of neurosurgical complications Do No Harm.  In the chapter "Pituitary Adenoma" he did a transphenoidal procedure on a man with acromegaly.  His description of the relevant anatomy: "There are however, two major arteries next to the pituitary gland that can, if the surgeon is exceptionally unlucky, be damaged during the operation."  His patient did well until post-operative day number 3, when suddenly his right arm was paralyzed and he could not communicate.  Brain imaging confirmed a major left hemispheric stroke.  Having no actual operative complications Marsh concludes: "This must have been caused in some unknowable way by the operation."

But let's take a look at what would have happened in my wife's case if there had been a complication or series of complications using the methodology cited by the authors in the studies.  First off, in the case of a complication where does the chain of errors begin.  The misdiagnosis of otitis media and two antibiotic prescriptions?  The misread CT scan of the sphenoid bone?  It seems like those are two preliminary errors right there even though neither was immediately threatening.  Combined with a surgical error that would be three medical errors had a complication occurred.  And what about the self correcting aspects of this process?  Does the ENT surgeon get any credit here for correcting the misdiagnosis of otitis media or the misreading of the CT scan?  Any focus on medical errors never looks at the self correcting aspects - how many times they are caught and how many times standard second opinions from colleagues or trusted referrals modify the treatment plan.  How much morbidity and mortality would occur without this level of self correction?  How is it estimated?  The best example I can recall of the problems of error determination was in a NEJM editorial to address the first report on medical errors by the Institute of Medicine.

In that editorial (5), the lead author of some of the most quoted studies discusses the issue of the definition of errors, the definition of preventability, and the subjective nature of these determinations.  His preliminary analysis is that the IOM conclusion that 44,000 to 98,000 deaths caused by medical errors "create an impression that is not warranted by the scientific work underlying the IOM report."  That number has been inflated to more than 250,000 according to the recent quoted report (1).   He also expresses an opinion completely consistent with Marsh's observations and goes on to point out that the observation of error can not cannot be reliably made by third party observers:

"Even with the best surgical technique and proper precautions, however, a hemorrhage can occur. We classified most postoperative hemorrhages resulting in the transfer of patients back to the operating room after simple procedures (such as hysterectomy or appendectomy) as preventable, even though in most cases there was no apparent blunder or slip-up by the surgeon. The IOM report refers to these cases as medical errors, which to some observers may seem inappropriate." (6)

He goes on to elaborate on four important aspects of the IOM report, 2 of which have to do with politics and public perception.  The first is the idea that either nothing is being done about safety or that things are getting more dangerous.  In many ways this is analogous to the public perception that violent crime is high when it is at a 30 year low.  He gives an even better example of Harvey Cushing's accomplishments during his neurosurgical career.  In 1913, the mortality rate for craniotomies for brain tumors was 80%.  In twenty years it was reduced to 13%.  Currently it is 1%.  All of that without the IOM or any of the current federal or state regulators.  The whole idea that physicians are motivated more by adhering to what politicians or regulators want rather than what is in the best interest of their patients has always been an incredible one to me.  I guess it makes sense only if you are a politician or a regulator and you really believe that your naively designed incentives and disincentives have meaning.   The second complication is increased reporting requirements and all of the complications that involves including the impact on confidential peer reviewed complications.  Every physician has participated in some form of complications conferences or what surgeons used to call morbidity and mortality conferences.  The modern goal of these conferences is to try to identify procedures and interventions to improve patients safety.  Opening that system up to increased reporting and subjecting it to the "dead weight of the litigation system" is something the author cautions against, but is often explicit in the news headlines.

Makary thought the IOM missed the boat on the issue of how malpractice litigation is a risk against internally driven safety initiatives.  I think they and subsequent authors missed the boat on the issue of biological variability.  To some degree is it addressed by the subjective determination of preventability but not entirely.  If a neurosurgeon is observed to have performed an errorless operation and the patient sustains significant complications, what are all of the factors that go into calling that an error or not?  A lot of it may have to due  with the baseline state of the patient.  Are they already compromised by injury, illness or congenital variations.  Neurosurgeons after all are not operating on healthy people.  The example also applies to medicine and psychiatry.  As an example, I usually tell people up front these days that there is about a 40% chance that they will noticeably improve with an antidepressant if their symptoms are significant.  There is another 20 or 30% chance that they will feel somewhat better but not get back to their baseline state.  There is a 10-20% chance that they will get significant side  effects and not want to continue the medication and in a small number of cases (1-2%) there is a chance of really severe side effects from the medication.  Pharmacogenomics suggests that it can be invaluable in this process, but there is variability between predictions using the available analyses from the same manufacturer and between manufacturers.  Even with that warning there are a number of people who will consider it an "error" that they received a medication that caused them to get a rash or in the worst case serotonin syndrome.  I think that there is a natural tendency for some to see any medical procedure that does not go well to be attributable to error on the part of the physician.  I think that the personal experience of most physicians will bear that out.        

Another less well known intervention in psychiatry is the care of the chronically suicidal person.  Many of these persons have a history of serious suicide attempts and remain at significant risk.  The usual risk factor analysis of their suicide potential does not add very much.  There are frequently inadequate resources to treat them or they refuse to access what is available.  Frequent short term admissions to inpatient units adds nothing to their care.  The psychiatrist who accepts their care usually is seeing them more intensely and accepting more crisis calls from them than other patients.  Until a sufficient therapeutic alliance develops, there may be many sessions with a lot of depression and anger and very little objective information on what the patient is thinking.  The psychiatrist and patient in this case need to accept that the risk involved in this situation from suicide or a suicide attempt - is necessary to make progress and enhance the patient's ability to function and enjoy life.

My main point here is that people currently need to assume some risks in order to get better.  There is nobody more than physicians who would want medicine to be a no risk endeavor, but the reality is that is not going to happen anytime soon.   All patients realize this at some level, but that may do little to mitigate the anger or disappointment when it occurs.  Every family has a tale to tell about a medical miracle or a medical mistake.   In the situations like my wife faced with my support, people are clearly willing to take the risk in face of undesirable consequences.  The physicians involved see this as very serious work.  Should the classification of medical errors be refined and analyzed?  Of course they should - but the approach being used in the press invoking planes full of patients being sent to their death by physicians being equated to terrorists is not accurate or helpful.  The backlash is significant and impairs the ongoing error analysis and correction process.  Equating a heterogenous collection of complications classified by different methods as errors and listing them as a standard cause of death is also not accurate or helpful to the science of medical error analysis and correction.


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA


References:

1:   Makary MA, Daniel M. Medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US. BMJ. 2016 May 3;353:i2139. doi: 10.1136/bmj.i2139. PubMed PMID: 27143499.

2: Brennan TA, Leape LL, Laird NM, Hebert L, Localio AR, Lawthers AG, Newhouse JP, Weiler PC, Hiatt HH. Incidence of adverse events and negligence in hospitalized patients. Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study I. N Engl J Med. 1991 Feb 7;324(6):370-6. PubMed PMID: 1987460.

3: Leape LL, Brennan TA, Laird N, Lawthers AG, Localio AR, Barnes BA, Hebert L, Newhouse JP, Weiler PC, Hiatt H. The nature of adverse events in hospitalized patients. Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study II. N Engl J Med. 1991 Feb 7;324(6):377-84. PubMed PMID: 1824793. 

4: Localio AR, Lawthers AG, Brennan TA, Laird NM, Hebert LE, Peterson LM, Newhouse JP, Weiler PC, Hiatt HH. Relation between malpractice claims and adverse events due to negligence. Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study III. N Engl J Med. 1991 Jul 25;325(4):245-51. PubMed PMID: 2057025. 

5: Brennan TA. The Institute of Medicine report on medical errors--could it do harm? N Engl J Med. 2000 Apr 13;342(15):1123-5. PubMed PMID: 10760315.

6:  Marsh H.  Do No Harm: Stories Of Life, Death, And Brain Surgery.  Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin's Press; New York,  NY; 2014.


Attribution:

Portrait of Harvey Cushing, MD by Edmund C. Tarbell [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADr_Harvey_Cushing_Edmund_Tarbell_1908.jpeg accessed on May 22, 2016.


Supplementaries:

Supplementary 1:  Another excellent example of biological variability is joint replacement surgery.  I see patients, friends and family members who have mixed experiences.  The majority turn out very well, in some cases extremely well.  In the case of extremely good joint replacement surgery, according to all of these people I talk to, the surgeon seems to discourage them talking to other people about how good the results were, generally by telling them that they had an extraordinary result in terms of how the replaced joint functions.

Supplementary 2:  A good example from a recent post about the aggressive treatment of pain and the risk of addiction and overdose deaths.  20 years ago when physicians were being criticized by various factions for not aggressive enough use of painkiller prescriptions and the use of opioids for chronic noncancer pain - the risk of death by overdose was minimized by those proponents.  Now that there is a clear cause of death from overuse of opioids and the rates of addiction have increased - physicians are faulted for not knowing how to prescribe opioids.  It seems like they had a better idea 20 years ago before yielding to the critics.  From the perspective of this post - there is always risk either way.  Only politicians and regulators can deny that.

Supplementary 3:  The Twitter graphic ( and yes I am serious).  The IOM did not start until about 1970.  None of these entities has a track record remotely close to Harvey Cushing in the 1920s and 1930s.