Teen held against her will by hospital for 16 months describes her ordeal.....(Justina Pelletier)

Lot's of things can happen. One huge issue going to the hospital these days is your primary care doctor is not the attending nor many times consulted physician. This makes for major diagnostic blunders in some cases.

I've gone up against six doctors before in two hospitals because the doctors had it in their minds a mental illness was causing a person I know to go unconscious, have hallucinations, agitation, very high blood pressure, head ache, thrashing, but no history of serious mental illness.

Those involved were mental health, ER, and interns. The primary care physician who knew and had the patients full medical history was not consulted nor allowed to see the patient. No medical. records were asked for. No testing such as MRI, CAT Scan, or blood work was done. No PDR of the medications was done for a week.

The doctors involved had mental illness can be the only cause prejudice and because of their own prejudice and arrogance nearly killed the patient.

The patient is a quadriplegic who was previously seeking treatment for simple anxiety and PTSD over a previous serious medical error in medication. How many shrinks prescribing antidepressants have a good understanding of possible serious adverse reactions they can cause? Likely less than 10%. But they write scripts for them like candy.

Trying to ask some doctors to consider anything other than their own preconceived notion can be difficult especially when the doctor doesn't know you or the patient. Trying to tell some doctors they are in fact wrong and you have the proof is worse. Patient I know had been given Zoloft and Dyserel two anti depressants. Had any one of the six doctors simply went on line or opened their PDR book and researched those two medications for possible adverse reactions they would have seen the same information I found on line. Serotonin Syndrome and it was approaching critical stage. They were wanting to increase antidepressants. The hospital contracted primary intern in charge said rubbish when I presented him with the information. I said oh your pharmacology professor writes rubbish? He read the name and got on a backwards bicycle real fast. The person lost some parts of her memory permanently and nearly had a stroke because the MRI they finally done a week into it after I told them what was wrong got done and showed a small bleeder in the brain.

Misdiagnosing of physical illness, medication adverse reactions, and neurological issues as mental illness, is one of the biggest problems happening today. It gets compounded when treatment for mental illness begins and other possibilities never considered or ignored.

Oh did I mention that unless a person has advanced treatment directives especially POA to a trusted family member the state becomes the one who makes decisions? Those kind of mistakes lead to the mistake made in the girls treatment. The parents had no say. The Child Protection Workers are in most states exempt from legal or civil liability added to the issue for the child in Boston most likely.

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