Nurses for Human Rights

The Boston Globe reports that the tragic death after poor medical care of Rebecca Riley has spawned a lawsuit against her psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji in Suffolk Superior Court. The attorneys that are taking the case said, “They made her a 4-year-old zombie,” per Andrew Meyer, Jr, whose Boston law firm Lubin & Meyer specializes in medical malpractice cases. “We don’t believe that she did suffer from bipolar or that this was the appropriate medication.” I think nurses need to take a stronger role in mental health and begin to say we want better and safer practices in this specialty. If we only have drugs to rely on to “manage” our patients, we are going to lose this game. We won’t be bringing people back to health, mentally or physically. Nurses need to insist we want better outcomes for our children and elderly. Psychotropics shorten lives, create devastation to familes by their adverse side effects, and for the most part hide medical problems that are not being addressed appropriately. We need to be better investigators. One of my favorite TV shows is “House”. I like it because Dr. House keeps looking for the underlying causes, not just treating the symptoms. We all need to be a little bit more House. I believe we should outlaw psychotropics for children. That may be drastic or impossible, but I don’t think it is. I think the severist of retardation or autism must be managed, but the largest population is not these types of cases. It’s the school child who gets frustrated in our school system, acts out,  and gets put on psychotropics for mis-behaving. This is the area I’m concerned about. And you should be too, or we will have more Rebecca Riley cases to deal with.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.