July 2013

Have you accessed your state’s PMP lately? Unless you practice in Missouri, the only wrong answer to the question is, “What’s a PMP?” The acronym stands for Prescription Monitoring Program, and Missouri is the only state that has not established one.  So what is it? Here is the definition, according to the Alliance of States with Prescription Monitoring Programs. What is a Pres ...

A man named John Rosemond is licensed in North Carolina as a psychologist.  For over 30 years, Mr. Rosemond has written a syndicated newspaper column that is carried by a couple hundred local papers throughout the country.  He has also written a number of books about his main topic: parenting. (For the record, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen or read his column, and I don’t know ...

A few days ago, an Asiana Airlines 777 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport.  The comments from the talking heads on TV as well as the general public were predictable: “How could an accident like this happen?” and “It’s a miracle that only two people out of the more than 300 aboard were killed” and “I’ll never feel safe flying again.”  Relatively few noted that i ...

Just recently, the Illinois legislature set aside a psychologist prescribing bill after initially supporting it.  (The Illinois Psychiatric Society’s president, Eldon Trame, MD, gives a nice summary of the whole process here.) What led me to explore what happened in Illinois was an article in the most recent issue of Psychiatric Times, “Why Psychiatrists Are Physicians First,” ...