One of the biggest resource drains on the ER. There is no continuity of care, and studies often get repeated and overlapped:
Across town, at Detroit Receiving Hospital, dozens of patients like Weiss-Frezzell show up every day, consuming doctors’ and nurses’ time, requiring costly medical tests and creating persistent frustration for medical staffs who struggle to treat pain-riddled patients but try to avoid giving them unnecessary medication.In some cases, drugs aren’t the best remedy for pain. And in other cases, addiction is the motivation for seeking medication.
The problem became so bad with one patient, who would visit each of the Detroit Medical Center’s three hospital emergency rooms in search of drugs, that the three ER chiefs held a special meeting to discuss how to handle the case.
“We have these patients where we see them and say, ‘Here they come again,’”‚” said Dr. Patricia Wilkerson-Uddyback, an emergency physician at Receiving. “But we still try to provide them with the best standard of care. It gets hard to balance between treating a medical condition and not contributing to a possible addiction.”
Related posts:
- Migraines and the stigma of chronic pain medication use
- Treating chronic pain with narcotics and avoiding the risk of addiction
- Chronic pain and drug pushing
- Chronic pain and the troops
- Chronic pain in the ER
- Chronic pain
- Hurwitz conviction: The Justice Department tells chronic pain patients to suffer
{ 2 comments }
You would think I’m making this story up but sadly it’s true. We have one patient who comes in to my ER twice weekly, one visit is for pain meds after “I tripped and fell” then the second visit she is always unresponsive after overdosing on Narcotics. We almost never give her the narcotics, but she gets it elsewhere. I always have to remind her as she’s being forcibly removed by security, “But you were just here last week and needed to be intubated because you overdosed. She spit in my face once, then returned the next night looking for narcs. I thank the lawyers that we just can’t refuse her visits.
Uddyback?
Comments on this entry are closed.