Psychiatrist Mendez-Villamil follows the rule and writes 97,000 prescriptions for mental health drugs to Medicaid patients in 10 minutes appoitments

The difference it that Fernando Mendez-Villamil is in the news because Senator Charley Grassley found it a little bit too much:

"I note with alarm that the top Medicaid prescriber during that time wrote 96,685 prescriptions for mental health drugs,`` Grasley wrote. ``That means that this physician wrote approximately 153 prescriptions each and every day, assuming he did not take vacations.''

According to the Associated Press the investigation began in 2007, triggered by a request from a private citizen.

This is remarkable and an encouragement to citizens start to do something when he/she witness something strange. Mendez-Villamil is now being investigated and Medicare stopped paying him in May.

The second top psychiatrist prescriber in Florida wrote "a little more than 53,000 prescriptions, according to a list compiled by state officials."

You can read the whole story being unfold here but I like to stress this:

"A Florida doctor who prescribed several mental health medications to a 7-year-old foster care boy who killed himself in April is also on the list. The drugs carried a special FDA black box warning indicating they can cause suicidal thoughts and are not approved for young children, though some doctors still prescribe them to treat children. (emphasis mine)

Dr. Sohail Punjwani wrote 10,150 prescriptions during the same two year period, according to the report.

Dr. Punjwani, who has appeared on the high-prescriber list multiple times but has never been sanctioned, did not immediately return a phone call left by The Associated Press on Thursday.

Grassley's letter comes months after Gabriel Myers hung himself with a shower cord at his foster parents' home while under Punjwani's care. The boy's death prompted debate at the state's child welfare agency about stricter rules for prescribing powerful antidepressants and other drugs to foster children. (emphasys mine)

Attention parents! Your children are not safe using these drugs. You can take whatever you want but, please, take care of your children.

Finally psychiatrists are invited to tell how they are prescribing these dangerous psych-drugs and it is about time that the thousands others who do the same have to answer for their clinical methods.

Many of those who are blogging have been prescribed like this: in 12 minutes meetings and the eyes of the physician are not on the patients eyes: they are staring the pen on the prescription notepad. I bet many don't even know if the patient who just left is blond, brunette, bald or hairy, thin or fat, big or small boobs (in the last case especially if the psychiatrist is a male who is taking or took a SSRI/SRNI antidepressant and had sexual fantasies and desire vanished as you can read here and here.

Via Furious Seasons.