File this under alternate health care.
It is being reported that at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax Nova Scotia has hired a psychologist to take care of emergency patients that complain of pain but don’t seem to have any physical symptoms.
What to do? Send him/her home telling them that they’re crazy and, “Oh, by the way, please don’t come back”?
No. That would not do.
This hospital has something better.
They refer the patient immediately to the hired talk-therapist to quiet the person down.
“Intensive, short-term dynamic psychotherapy” they call it. After the session they then send them home without telling them they’re crazy (but still thinking that they might be).
Apparently it must be working. The hospital now reports:
“Helping people recognize the link between their physical symptoms and their stress or emotions resulted in a 69 per cent drop in repeat visits to the emergency room by patients in this group. Hospital visits dropped from an average of almost 4.6 visits a year to 1.4 visits a year, the researchers found” says the report.
As an example they say that they saw an 80 per cent drop in panic attacks with just a single interview.
Plus:
- The average treatment was completed in just 3.8 sessions
- patients reported a high degree of satisfaction.
- For every 100 people seen by the staff psychologist, there will be 300 fewer emergency visits a year, which adds up to a huge savings and reduction in unnecessary tests
Wow.
Sure sounds good alright.
I wonder though.
I used to live in a government town while growing up and I can tell you that if a government sponsored agency spends public funds the suits in the corner offices will be heavy on building a good story that backs their decisions.
I’m not saying that they’re not getting results, they may indeed be. But it’s been shown time and again that left to our own devices many of us humans will recover on our own, in due time anyway, without intervention. I’ve read about studies that detail surprising findings. Like the one that showed that subjects who go through the AA 12 step program could actually get better results by doing nothing at all.
In the good old days (100 years ago) anxiety used to be handled by the sufferer. He just talked with friends or family who just told him that he’s not going bananas and that everything is going to be ok “so get back to work and plow your field of corn you puff-cake!.
The big problem is no one’s got very many close friends any more.
Now we’ve got to pay a pro to do what used to come freely.
If we have to use the psych services why not do what the good doctors are doing in England. There they have so much demand for mental health services that they decided to work out of the box for a change.
To meet the demand a patient can now log on to a special internet site and, his appointment is handled by “talking” to his psychiatrist who could be sitting at home or in his fancy office sipping his tea.
The patient simply types away and, with his own descriptions, gives the details the problem.
Here’s what happens a surprising number of times:
Turns out that the patient, who can now see his whole story in black and white, and in his own words, often begins to recognize that his “problem” doesn’t amount to a hill o’beans in the scheme of things and he soon begins to feel better.
Now I’m sure you may have noticed that on this site that I promote the idea that there exists another immune system in the human person that works to control out of control thinking. The only problem with it is that it works very slowly.
So slowly in fact that it appears to not work at all sometimes.
I think I have something that can fix that.
We mostly work with entrepreneurs and wannabes because it’s tough to get through the learning curve without driving over the edge sometimes.
All we do is show them how to use our on-line “machine”. By doing that they seem to get so confident in themselves they feel that they can take on the world with ease. It takes less than a day to complete and results are permanent.
They end up having a mindset that won’t get offset.
More power to you.