Does our health-care system (including researchers) engage in rent-seeking when they ignore simple cheap remedies, including prevention?
Here’s a simple example of rent-seeking. Some friends and I went to visit the Great Wall. On the path up to the wall was a man sitting in a chair. He demanded 30 cents to let us pass. There was no gate. He wasn’t a government official — just a man and a chair. There was a path to a goal. It was blocked unless we paid.
In the case of health there are many paths to the goal. Many ways to become healthier — many ways to relieve depression, for example. Prevention is one way, cure another. There are cheap cures and expensive cures. By ignoring prevention and cheap cures, the profession of psychiatry is blocking those paths (by failing to clear them) and thereby forcing us to take their expensive path (dangerous drugs), usage of which they control. It’s more subtle than the man with the chair but it amounts to the same thing.
Rent-seeking is annoying. I was annoyed by the man in the chair. The rent-seeking of our health-care system is disguised, not easy to make out. This makes it less of problem for health-care professionals, such as doctors; I think few people are aware of it. (For example, most people with acne don’t realize it is probably caused by their food.) But my friend with depression was annoyed, deeply annoyed, when he learned of a simple cheap (partial) solution to his problem.
Not ALL psychiatrists are like that.
Check out this psychiatrist’s blog:
https://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/
By the way, this psychiatrist is a professor at Emory, which wasn’t very happy about his blog, and tried to make him delete references to the fact that he was affiliated with Emory from his blog. The blogosphere supported him in protesting this muzzling, and Emory relented.
He also has a novel in progress about a psychiatrist doing research on the link between accutane (the acne drug) and suicide, which is understandably unpopular with the drug’s maker. The psychiatrist-protagonist is based at Emory, where some of his colleagues aren’t too happy with the research either.
I think you’d find the blog and the novel interesting.
Not all psychiatrists think that drugs are the answer to every problem.
Thanks, Mary. I like his blog and added it to my blogroll.
That’s surprising that Emory would try to make him delete references to the fact that he was affiliated with Emory. More bad public relations….
Good points, although those of us in higher education should probably light the irony lamp when we talk about rent-seeking (not to imply that you aren’t aware that we’re the poster children of this phenomenon).