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The doctor and co-host of the program The extraordinary powers of the human body, Michel Cymes answers questions from Internet users for Brut. On the program: mental health of young people and the fight against medical deserts.
At the question “Is mental health really taken into account in practices?” Michel Cymes replies that it is the duty of a doctor to see when his patient is not well: “The best way to treat someone who is bad is to start by talking, to listen to them, it’s psychotherapy and not to give them a psychotropic drug that will knock them out.”. The doctor regrets the problem of prescribing psychotropic drugs, sometimes automatically, especially for young patients. “When a young person is not well, and there are many who are not well today, we know that, we tend to prescribe medication very easily”. The real solution would be support from a mental health professional. But to this conclusion, Michel Cymes underlines another problem from which the medical field suffers in France: the shortage of nursing staff.
Increasingly difficult medical care in France
For the doctor, one of the great causes of this medical desert, which settled in France, dates back to the 1970s. It would be linked to “closed number”, or the idea of limiting the number of students to be trained in a discipline, here medicine. The solution would be “of set up more health centres. We have to authorize advanced practice nurses, that is to say to train for 2 or 3 years to have better skills and that doctors agree to let go a little”, says Michel Cymes. Because if the lack of doctors is felt in the city, the situation is more complex in the countryside. “It’s something completely crazy. We are one of the richest countries in the world and despite everything, we cannot have appointments with a doctor”. And the lack is even more felt among medical specialists. “It’s even worse and we’re really going to have to get out of this health slump, and very quickly” he adds.
Currently unusable solutions
To this, several tracks could allow France to get out of this situation, but they are difficult to exploit according to Michel Cymes. This is the case of doctors from abroad: “The problem is that their doctor’s degree must be recognized by France”. Because if the foreign doctor is qualified outside Europe, as “Algeria or other countries that are not recognized by France will practice in France”, he will be paid half as much as a French doctor for equivalent skills.
Forcing young doctors to settle in medical deserts is not a solution either. For Michel Cymes, a change of “rules of the game for those entering the medical sector” would be possible. “If I’m a young person who wants to enter the medical field, and someone says to me “here, the rules of the game are these, you will be obliged to give a few years of your time in a medical desert”, I know that at the end of my studies, I will need to do this and it’s up to me to choose if I go or if I don’t”.
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