Why medical psychiatry is vital for my patients
Dr. Paul Summergrad’s guest editorial “Medical psychiatry: The skill of integrating medical and psychiatric care” (Current Psychiatry. February 2017, p. 11-13) was enormously helpful and validating for those of us who treat the full array of biomedical causes of psychiatric symptoms. My specialty is treating persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities who do not communicate through speech, display serious symptoms such as severe aggression toward themselves or others, or have life-threatening failure to thrive. For my patients, the key is to accurately diagnose and treat the vast array of co-occurring biomedical conditions. This requires me to perform physical examinations that my colleagues have skipped in the 5-minute primary care visits they are allowed, make a lot of home visits, and order more blood tests and imaging studies than my fellow psychiatrists in other specialties do. Only in these ways, I am able to offer effective treatment options that improve the quality of life of these suffering individuals. I suspect there are many more psychiatrists who work the same way.
For me, the most inspiring sentence in Dr. Summergrad’s editorial was, “It is incumbent on us to pursue the medical differential of patients when we think it is needed, even if other physicians disagree.” I believe that this describes our job as physicians who specialize in psychiatry. To have a clinician of Dr. Summergrad’s stature write this was inspiring because it goes to the core of what more of us should do.
Ruth Myers, MD
Psychiatrist
The Community Circle PLLC
Burnsville, Minnesota