Thursday 27 January 2011

Anxiety

We've had this and this paper look at antidepressant medication use in mild depression.

Yesterday we had updated guidance on the use of medication in the management of anxiety. NICE guidance now is that, "GPs should not offer benzodiazepines or antipsychotics to patients presenting with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD)," the one page summary is here.

Will that mean their drugs budget comes over to me, so I can treat them then? :P

3 comments:

Jobbing Doctor said...

I've always found NICE guidelines in the psychiatric field rather biased and frankly dictatorial.

I don't take much notice of these, as they are (again) overly prosciptive

pj said...

To be fair it actually says that benzos shouldn't be used except for short term 'crisis' and antipsychotics (except quetiapine which it doesn't consider) shouldn't be used in primary care. I think we already knew that.

I too have always found NICE psych guidelines both overly prescriptive and strangely obsessed with low level psychological or self-help interventions that I have found in practice to be difficult to obtain, difficult to get patients to buy into, and not very effective.

Single Female Doc said...

Another example of us all being tarred with the same brush. To my knowledge, its only a small minority of us GPs who regularly use benzos innappropriately or give anti psychotics willy nilly. Most of us know to use these potent drugs sparingly - but Nanny NICE tells us we're all naughty children who shouldn't play with the funny coloured sweeties :-(