What’s worse than drugs and therapy? Oh yeah…drugs and NO therapy.

From Scienceblog:

"…[scientists] analyzed trends in psychotherapy provision using data from national surveys of office-based psychiatrist visits from 1996 through 2005.

Over the 10-year period, psychotherapy was provided in 5,597 (34 percent) of 14,108 visits lasting longer than 30 minutes. The percentage of visits involving psychotherapy declined from 44.4 percent in 1996-1997 to 28.9 percent in 2004-2005. "This decline coincided with changes in reimbursement, increases in managed care and growth in the prescription of medications," the authors write.

The number of psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all of their patients also declined over the same time period, from 19.1 percent to 10.8 percent. "Psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all of their patients relied more extensively on self-pay patients, had fewer managed-care visits and prescribed medications in fewer of their visits compared with psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy less often," the authors write."

Yet another example of how our f’d up system of letting for-profit entities run health care as they see fit is resulting in more and more of a "drug-em-bill-em-and-forget-em" approach.

Caring: It’s not good for the bottom line.

Even funnier, though — when you pull up this article, the "Similar Entries" section reads:

Similar entries