How to Use Slack to Learn Psychopharmacology

No clinical trial could produce data about the following cocktail used by the great psychopharmacologist, Ivan Goldberg, to treat excessive skin picking:

".rxIvanGoldbergTrichSkinPicking
1. Start Naltrexone 25 mg/d for three days, then 50 mg/d
2. Start Anafranil 25 mg bid, with increases of 25 mg/d every three days up to 75 mg bid.
3. In one week, start Buspar and gradually increase up to 30 mg bid."
(@ https://www.opensourcepsychiatry.com/smartphrase-library.html

And, for a young practitioner, it might be difficult to believe in and then concoct a combination of fluvoxamine and clomipramine for treatment-resistant OCD (without expert guidance):

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to invite all of you to join the psychopharmacology Slack team at Open Source Psychiatry.

Slack allows you to join a channel, which streams your questions in real-time to a community of other practitioners and/or learners.

Slack is HIPAA-compliant and to be a participant on the team you need to both enable 2-factor authentication and make your channel “private.”

You also have to agree to all of the rules here:

1. No patient-sensitive data. Slack is HIPAA compliant. However, patient-sensitive data should not be entered. If you have a patient who is 82-years-old, say, “elderly.” If you have a patient named, Mr. Jones, say, Mr. X. Any member of our Slack channel who uses patient-sensitive information will be terminated from the team and be solely responsible for any medical=legal consequences.

2. No insults.

3. No titles.

4. Use two-factor authentication. Even though you will not be inputting patient-sensitive data and Slack is HIPAA-compliant, given that Trump won the election, you can never be too paranoid. You must turn on two-factor authentication from within your account to be a member.

5. Ibid. Convert your channel to a private channel.

There’s never a reason to keep education and learning restricted. Clinicians, patients, therapists, and doctors can all benefit from learning more about psychopharmacology.

If you’d like to join...

1) Email me at my HIPAA-compliant email address, dsoskin@protonmail.com, and I can add you to the team.

2) Open up the email invite I send you and click on the join icon:

3) Follow the instructions provided by Slack to create your account.

4) Follow the animated and easy to follow tutorial provided by Slack on how to use the channel e.g. how to respond to questions, post articles, etc.

5) For questions about how to use 2-factor authentication and make your channel provide it, google it and Slack instructions will be at the top of your google queue.

If you like this article, consider reading, "How to read the medical literature," which teaches you to create an algorithm (using either best journals or best authors) to optimize your learning on PubMed. To read it, click here. To watch the lecture, click here.