My son has a complicated set of prescriptions that restored him to euthymia after two years of hideous depression. I am so grateful for his cocktail.

These are all generic drugs. No one is winning cruises for writing scripts on the $4 list.

Ahh yes, better living through modern chemistry.

And medicine as a skill/occupation, if you’ve been around it, isn’t something you “do”. But rather something you practice. I never one “did” medicine to or on any patient I dealt with in 20 years of being an EMT or Medic. I practiced medicine within my scope of practice, (there’s that word again), just like any doctor or nurse.

And when you administer a medication/prescribe to a patient, that’s called a “trial”. Why is it called a “trial”? Be you have no idea what it’s going to do to a patient. You simply go on past collective and professional experiences. And then you hand them a pill and wait to see what it does. It’s going either cure them, do nothing, or it kills them. The 3 True Outcomes.

The first and last options means that you don’t need to deal with the patient again. It’s the middle option, “does nothing” that is a huge problem. That’s when you pull out that bingo card in the cartoon and start trying to get your bingo some other way. And sometimes you even need to hit the blackout to get a bingo. And that’s how you get the cartoon.

I will leave with this wise thought I got at an EMS symposium many years ago. The keynote speaker told us “That no matter how much we think we know about medicine and believe how advanced we’ve become in caring for people, it all still boils down to keeping the patient amused and letting nature take it’s course”.

Haha medicine bad anti vax good. You are not like the other people, you are very smart!

Sorry can’t hear you over the sound of my Paxil

Rearrange that and I would’ve gotten 2 bingos if we’re counting all the meds I’ve been prescribed in my life

Medications are only there to enrich your doctor! The medical industry only exists to extract profit! You don’t need drugs - it’s natural to be depressed, just look at how bad the world is! ADHD is a superpower! Autism is caused by vaccines!

- Things said by idiots.

(edit: Or just the misguided. Disillusion with the medical industry and all its myriad problems is understandable, but that doesn’t make it a conspiracy nor does it mean the people who dedicate their lives to it are all profit-driven goblins that don’t care about you. Overprescription is a hugely complex and heavily propagandized topic, but tarring all mental health professionals with this brush and discouraging people from getting what little professional help is available is indefensible)

So the plot of