Now you know how physicians feel

The irony is rich with this one. Here we have a psychiatry-mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP) who's butthurt about family nurse practitioners (FNPs) being hired by psychiatry offices with no previous psychiatry experience. Well, guess how physicians who have completed years of medical school, residency, and fellowship feel when nurse practitioners - especially new graduates - are brought into hospitals and clinics with little or no clinical experience other than the few hundred clinical hours of "training" they had in NP school. And no, nursing experience doesn't count. And to add insult to injury, the AANP and its ilk are trying to push for these minimally experienced individuals to have the right to practice independently of physician oversight and supervision!

"You wouldn't hire a primary care physician to work in a psych office, would you?" Well, given the choice between that and a PMHNP, we would hire the PCP without hesitation, any day of the week. We can rest assured that a US MD/DO graduate would have completed at least one psychiatry clerkship as part of their clinical rotations in medical school, and certainly would have been tested on the major aspects of psychiatry as part of the USMLE and COMLEX board exams. Not to mention the average primary care physician is still more than capable of handling basic psychiatric complaints such as anxiety and depression. Indeed, as this PMHNP asks: "What's the point of our specialty?" When better-educated and better-trained physicians exist, we would argue that there's no point for PMHNPs to exist at all.