Overtreating pain

Aggravated DocSurg explores the downside of the “fifth” vital sign:

Couple that issue with the militant attitude of JACHO [sic] —-there shall be no pain!!— whose guidelines insisted that anyone with a pain score greater than 5 must be reassessed. In the real world, unless a nurse wants to go through the headache of extra paperwork, reassessment means “remedicate.” And, of course, there is the all-too-frequent patient who describes pain as being “10 out of 10” as soon as he is arouse from a profoundly deep, narcotic induced sleep; how does one truly rate him with JCAHO’s mandates in mind?

And that, my friends, is how we have gotten into the pickle of potentially overmedicating, overnarcotizing, and oversedating patients sometimes to dangerous levels. That doesn’t just lead to sleepy patients……it can lead to death.

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