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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3009 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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For example, why do antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia? Nobody knows. Why do clozapine and olanzapine cause the most weight gain (within antipsychotics)? Fuck knows. There is no logical chain that leads from the pharmacology of clozapine to it causing more weight gain than ziprasidone. We only know these things through observation. The exam questions reflect this reality. They do not ask you to model the interaction of dopamine antagonists with hypothalamic appetite centers. They ask: "Which of the following drugs is most associated with weight gain?" This is not a test of your reasoning. It is a test of your internal lookup table. You either pass the herblore skill check or you don't.

Sure, but I would classify this closer to the ‘classical’ examination than the rote legal memory check where, you FOOL, you forgot that it was actually a class 5(a)i notice and not a class 5(b)i one even though you actually! In the sense that I would imagine that smart and well-read psychiatry students would probably know that antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia and so on. Even moreso for Freud’s ‘nonsense’.

I would imagine that smart and well-read psychiatry students would probably know that antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia

I... uh... didn't know that until I opened my revision notes to look for examples. You are welcome to update on how smart or well-read a psychiatry student I am. In all fairness, that knowledge is irrelevant in clinical use, I've never seen or heard of a psychiatrist not prescribing because of pneumonia risk from an antipsychotic.

But, in general, my main source of frustration is irrelevant information gumming up the syllabus rather than the fact that a lot of memorization is involved. If what I have to memorize a lot of facts to be a good psychiatrist, then that's just what I need to do. But I don't enjoy, and in fact, hate quite a bit of what I'm forced to learn. Physics majors aren't grilled on their knowledge of Aristotlian mechanics, nor are chemists asked to produce the schematics of the alembic necessary for transmuting lead to gold. It's all so tiresome.

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