News

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) wants rural hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) to take certain new steps to ensure that the private-office psychiatrists they connect to in big cities for telemedicine services are qualified for that purpose.

Focus on Obesity, Insulin Resistance, and the Metabolic Syndrome

The aging of the world’s populations represents one of the most remarkable success stories in medicine and of humankind, but it is also a source of various challenges.

Chances are good you finally have a Web site for your practice. That’s assuming you’re among the majority of physicians - 65 percent, according to our latest Technology Survey. But is your Web site much more than a page or two listing your practice location and contact information? Probably not. And should it be more? Certainly.

Patients on average spent between 1 and 8 hours per day preoccupied with negative thoughts about their perceived [mal]odor.

One September morning . . .

If surveys conducted by physician recruiting companies accurately reflect current trends in the job market, the news is very good for psychiatrists-and less promising for many patients with mental health disorders.

The most disturbing turbulence at the boundary between psychiatry and the law is the misuse of a makeshift psychiatric diagnosis to justify the involuntary, indefinite psychiatric commitment of rapists. This is a disguised form of preventive detention and an abuse of psychiatry.

There are very real concerns about the miners’ mental well-being. Chile’s Health Minister reported that five of the men were not eating properly and refused to be filmed. In the meantime, a team of nutritionists and psychologists have been assembled to monitor their physical and mental states.

Just imagine. If you are not a transgender individual, what must it feel like to always think, as far back as you may remember, that you should have the body of the opposite gender? That you were “born in the wrong body”.

Pediatrician Sandy L. Chung on getting schooled in the business of medicine during her first year of practice.

Which antidepressants are associated with the highest rates of sexual dysfunction in patients treated for depression? This and more in this week's quiz.

Are psychiatrists agents of the police or doctors who care for the sick? Thomas Szasz raised this question 50 years ago in his iconic “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Psychiatry has changed in the ensuing decades, but Szasz’ question is still relevant. Why?

Embracing part-time and work-at-home schedules to help fit the right medical practice employee pieces into place.

A Federal appeals court has supported an earlier ruling by a lower court that established the unconstitutionality of gassing disruptive mentally ill inmates in their cells.

The challenge of new technology - as in the example of robot-assisted surgery - is that costly innovations often become the standard of care before there’s sufficient evidence to tell whether they add real value that justifies their expense.

Although Charles O’Brien, MD, who heads the substance-related disorders work group, is a vigorous proponent of the notion of addiction as a disease, nothing about the proposed DSM-5 substance-related disorders section supports the idea that the syndrome is best understood as a chronic brain disease.

My colleague Allen Frances is rightly concerned with the risk of over-calling normal grief as major depression - - that is, the risk of "false positives" - - if the DSM-IV "bereavement exclusion" is dropped in the DSM-5 while the 2-week minimum duration criterion is retained.

Before jumping the gun to a premature and potentially harmful diagnosis, why not watchfully wait a few more weeks to determine if the grief is severe and enduring enough to warrant the label of mental disorder.