Chairman of the Association of Psychiatry in an unprecedented critique of the committee's conduct: "Offensive statements - and disregard for state-of-the-art drugs and mental health technologies" • Basket Committee: "Rejects claims"
Drug Basket Committee
Photography:
GPO
Exposure: The
chairman of the Israel Psychiatric Association of the Medical Association raises a sharp and unprecedented criticism of the drug basket committee.
The allegations, he said: Some of its members make "unprofessional, disparaging, abusive and mocking statements about mental illness, and the committee has been ignoring most of the latest mental health drugs and technologies for many years."
This is the first time in the 22 years of activity of the public committee in the Ministry of Health to expand the drug basket that a medical association criticizes so harshly and harshly, and it is also the first time in Israel that such allegations of continued discrimination against the Israeli public are very large.
According to the union's estimates, about 30 percent of the Israeli public will need help, treatment or psychological support during their lifetime.
The criticism was raised in a letter sent by the union's chairman, Dr. Zvi Fischel, director of the psychiatric ward at Geha Hospital in Petah Tikva, to Prof. Shuki Shemer, chairman of the drug basket committee, but according to Fischel, he did not receive it from the committee's chairman or members Some response to a letter sent back in November. The Psychiatric Association has about 1,000 psychiatric doctors from all the hospitals and health funds in the country.
This year, the Drug Basket Committee discussed, among other things, the recommendations of the Psychiatric Association and the National Mental Health Council in the Ministry of Health to introduce new drugs for the treatment of ADHD and new technologies for surgery that leads to brain stimuli for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Sustainability, as well as surgery designed to implant a pacemaker in the neck that transmits electrical signals to the brain and helps treat very severe depression.
The innovative treatment is intended for patients with depression who can no longer be treated with all available medications, and some of whom are already after many suicide attempts.
According to the doctors, for these patients this is a really life-saving treatment.
As revealed in "Israel Today" in November, in an unprecedented move, about ten of Israel's top psychiatrists appealed to the Drug Basket Committee to add to the 2021 basket the innovative technology of pacemaker implantation for the treatment of depression.
Infected with stigmas
However, despite all this, the basket committee has already decided to downgrade the surgeries for the treatment of severe mental disorders and they will not enter the basket this year, and according to the psychiatric association, the new drugs for attention deficit disorders will not enter the public medicine basket.
Dr. Fischel told Israel Today that "the drug basket committee is tainted with stigmas and a lack of understanding of the many efficacies of mental health treatments, which are life-saving and improve quality of life at a level that does not fall short of other technologies easily approved by the Commission in recent years."
According to Fishel, "In the committee's deliberations, arguments were made by some of the committee members against the new drugs and technologies infected with very severe ignorance and statements were made, for example, that ADHD is a 'fashionable disease'."
Dr. Fischel wrote to Prof. Shemer that “reliable information that came to us from the discussions of the Basket Committee aroused my anger, amazement and pain.
"In the last ten years, psychiatric drugs and technologies have not received the proper and sensible share, and from people present at the discussions we learn about disparaging treatment and statements that show that there is no understanding that psychiatric disorders originate in brain disorders."
Fischel further warned that "information obtained from those present at the hearings revealed a disparaging and mocking attitude, stemming from a lack of familiarity with the material and worse, a reluctance to understand what 2020 psychiatry is," stressing that in the past two years he appeared before the basket committee to ignore neglect. And to the discrimination that they are critical in the Corona Age. "
The basket committee responded that "Dr. Fishel's letter was forwarded to members of the basket committee for review.
The committee discusses his request and rejects allegations that appear in his letter regarding alleged discrimination and allegedly abusive statements. "