Originally Posted by
LTN Phobia
Then I recommend wording it better than saying that suggesting seeing a doctor is "awful advice". By saying this, you have effectively tainted all doctors as being too incompetent to give advice on hypnotics. Clearly, this would not be the case.
"Awful" may have been an exaggeration. But the advice I quoted referred to "your doctor" by which people mean "your GP". I would not expect GPs to be able to give a typical patient better advice on drugs like zopiclone than they can find on the internet. My experience (from at least three different GPs) has been that it has generally been worse. If you call this "incompetence" that's a word of your choosing, not mine.
At least if the advice given by GP is wrong, you have some recourse.
So seeing your GP is a kind of insurance policy? You can sue it it goes wrong? Do you tell them that's the main purpose of the appointment when you make it?
without seeing a GP, you cannot get most of the drugs spoken about in this thread
A significant portion of the drugs mentioned here can actually be obtained legally in the UK or the US without a prescription, so "most" is an overstatement. But I appreciate that some cannot.
By discouraging people from seeing their doctor for hypnotics, you are encouraging people to obtain drugs from unofficial sources,
Well I won't get into a debate about the extent to which the state should control the supply of drugs, because it's not actually relevant because again you are (I assume now deliberately) misrepresenting what I said. I disparaged the recommendation to "check with your doctor". I have nothing against going to your doctor and asking for a prescription for what you want, having first figured it out from knowledgeable sources. Quite a lot of people do actually do just that - and not just for sleeping pills but for antibiotics and all sort of other things - and quite a lot of GPs will oblige, although obviously not if they think the request unjustified. My own "knowledgeable sources", as well as wikipedia, happen to include a close friend who is a consultant psychiatrist who lectures on drug abuse at one of the main London teaching hospitals; he would be prepared to write a private prescription for me (he has done once, I think) but considers it a bit more the done thing for me to go and see a doctor in a professional capacity and ask for what I want there.