Today I spoke to a coworker who had bad experiences with doctors and was seeking recommendations for a new one, then other coworkers chimed in, and so I decided to ask you guys as well. Well, not for a doctor recommendation, but about your bad experienced with doctors?

I’m gonna spoiler mine, because it makes me very uncomfortable, so perhaps it may make someone else very uncomfortable.

uncomfortable

I had a doctor who had no business in it make me show my intimate parts (I’m intersex) and she touched them. She was curious, I guess…? She’s a psychiatrist, so, again, literally 0 business doing so. I already have trauma from regular people who treat me like a circus display, I really had no need for someone with systemic power over me using it like that…

No, I didn’t report this. I was a teenager and barely functioning at the time. :/

  • intensely_human
    31·
    8 months ago

    My psychiatrists told me for well over a decade that they reason it takes antidepressants a couple weeks to start working is they need to build up in the blood.

    Later research showed that antidepressants work through neurogenesis, same way as exercise. The thing that takes two weeks is the proliferation of new and differentiated cells eventually leading to new emotional states.

    This whole “build up in the blood” thing never made any sense. If you ingest MDMA or alcohol it doesn’t need time to build up in the blood. The timeframe for an ingested chemical to reach peak volumes in the blood is about 30-60 minutes.

    This story never made sense, yet it was accepted and parroted by doctors everywhere.

    • Fosheze@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      8 months ago

      This depends on the antidepressant. Most modern antidepressants have a relatively short half-life in the body. For example the one I’m on now has a half-life of about 10 hours. However one of the first SSRIs and the still most frequently prescribed one, Fluoxetine, has a half life of 4 days for the medication itself and its metabolite has a half-life of up to 10 days. So that one does literally take weeks to fully build up in the blood and that’s probably why doctors use that line.

      Regardless, even with the shorter half-life drugs it does take a couple of weeks for your brain to adjust to the altered neurotransmitter levels. So even if it’s not technically “waiting for it to build up in the blood”, the result is the same and it’s an easily understandable explanation for doctors to use even if it’s not technically correct.