Edwin Leap: “We are an incredibly over-medicated culture, and nowhere is it worse, nowhere more damning of the addictive nature of humanity, than in the South, where pain prescriptions are revered like gold nuggests and disability payments have the allure of the Holy Grail!”
Related posts:
- The language of the South
- Disability
- How physicians can go on disability
- Suicide: "Why don’t we let her?"
- A night in the ED
- An ER physician laments
- Edwin Leap: Giving back
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We made that monster–well rather a few bad apples did–by taking the view that medicine is just a business, the customer is always right and the dollar the measure of success–therefore “if people will pay me 80$ a pop for 20 patients an hour to dispense oxycontin, then that is fine business to be in.”
One reason that I don’t deer hunt any more is all the methadone loaded hunters on disability for their “bad back” out there–climbing trees, dragging 200# bucks out of the woods, riding ATV’s.
But for every one of them, there are several of their cousins (Gringo no less) who are at work in chronic pain but wouldn’t take an opiate if you put a gun to their head. There are plenty of stoic people out there with a work ethic–they just don’t go to your ER unless they have an abrupt emergency because they also, just as they believe in working, believe in paying their bills and therefore avoid the ER and have a regular doctor. You don’t see them.
In working in the ER with it’s obligation to take all and practice of screwing the financial hell out the few who actually pay their own bill–you set yourself up to seeing those who don’t care how high the bill is because they have no intentions of paying it–and all the other stuff that goes with that attitude including disrespect for the doctor.
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