Jeanette E Bland, MD

After reading the previous review I am no longer surprised by Dr. Jeannette Blands unprofessionalism.
I have left three messages within a two week period explaining to the Dr. That she was on my insurance plans list of providers who is accepting new patients and would like to schedule an appointment at her earliest convenience.
Here I am two weeks and three messages later, still waiting for a call back.

I visited Dr Bland for ongoing monitoring of the medications I had been taking for ADHD and unipolar depression. I was simultaneously visiting a different psychotherapist.
PRO:
Jeanette is very personable and compassionate. She takes her time for appointments and seems to genuinely care about you. I did not visit her for psychotherapy, so I shouldn’t really comment on that, but I could easily imagine her possibly being quite good at that.
CONS THAT LED ME TO LEAVE:
She fails to keep adequate records. On multiple occasions, she forgot what she had earlier prescribed to me, or she remembered incorrectly. Sometimes she would write things in her appointment book, sometimes on loose sheets of paper that never seemed to reemerge at later visits. She would look up a drug interaction, then forget about it at the next visit and attempt again to prescribe the combination she had ruled out last time until I pointed it out myself and she looked it up again. Also, her billing was messed up. She ended up sending me a letter (with very poor grammar) complaining about an unpaid bill that had indeed been paid.
CONS I NOTICED LATER:
When I later visited a very competent doctor (who I will also review), he immediately rattled off all the drug interactions that Dr Bland kept looking up and forgetting about. While Dr Bland had relied on an iPhone app to determine that the drugs she had in mind were not per se incompatible, even though they could interact, the new doctor immediately explained what the actual mechanism of the interaction was: because of the way they are metabolized, one drug makes the plasma concentration of the other very unpredictable, which makes it very hard to titrate to the correct dose. Moreover, the interaction could vary over time, and no test was readily available to measure plasma concentration. For that reason, he would never prescribe that combination except in some exceptional circumstances where a patient did not respond to or could not tolerate any other ADD drug *nor* any other antidepressant.
Furthermore, he was extremely surprised at Dr Bland’s advice, when I complained about insomnia at night and extreme sleepiness during the day, that I take my ADD drugs in the morning and my antidepressant in the evening. He said that this is good advice for *most* antidepressants and *most* ADD drugs, but in the particular case of the two drugs Dr Bland had prescribed, the opposite was true.
Most drugs for ADD are stimulants, with insomnia as a side effect, and most drugs used for minor cases of depression are SSRIs, which can be slightly sedative (especially the ones that are more effective against anxiety). But the particular ADD drug I was on (atomoxetine) actually causes sleepiness, and the antidepressant (duloxetine) is an SNRI that is somewhat stimulant. I switched around the order and felt an immediate improvement.
NOTE:
Psychiatry is hard. Drug effects vary enormously from individual to individual, disorders overlap and are hard to diagnose, patients often have unrealistic expectations, are overly suspicious, and fail to commit to the persistent experimentation it takes for psychiatric treatment to work.
I say this because there are many negative reviews of mental health professionals on Unilocal that seem to come from patients who are understandably frustrated but ultimately fail to realize that psychiatry is not like setting bones or filling cavities. (Not that those are easy, but there are fewer judgment calls.)
I know that many psych drug side effects subside over time, so I did not immediately demand to stop drugs that didn’t agree with me.
I know that psychiatric treatment can only really be effective if you combine a reasonable amount of tenacity with a willingness to experiment, and take a holistic approach, including pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, exercise, and so on. This is why I did not expect or demand that all my problems would go away at the drop of a pill.
Despite all of these things, I find that Dr Bland is not just a doctor I don’t happen to «click» with. She is a doctor who routinely makes mistakes that could be potentially dangerous. She fails to do even the things you don’t have to be an especially good doctor for, like simple record keeping. Having a specialization that does not require a panoply of tests and imaging or a retinue of assistants and nurses, record keeping in psychiatry is comparatively simple. For all I care she could just keep a little notebook for each patient and put them on a bookshelf; nothing fancier is required, really. Med school 101. Come on already.
SUGGESTIONS FOR DR BLAND:
Hire an administrative assistant to help you with record keeping, and keep up your knowledge of psychopharmacology, including the metabolism of drugs. If you prefer to focus your practice on psychotherapy, just refer patients out to somebody else for pharmacotherapy; there is no shame in specialization.

She’s great! Very low key, understanding, patient, down to earth. She helped me a lot during a rough time. Not a pill pusher at all. The most helpful out of several i looked into. She’s great!