There is a fine line between drug seeking and legitimate disease. The decision to give narcotics is a challenge for every ER physician.
Related posts:
- Patient satisfaction vs pain relief
- Why primary care doctors shouldn’t be pain specialists
- Chronic pain in the ER
- Treating chronic pain with narcotics and avoiding the risk of addiction
- Pain management: You play doctor
- Pain management and contradictory articles
- Migraines and the stigma of chronic pain medication use
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“Hey! WhiteCoat! Don’t be a sucker.”
Sigh.
I thank him for the candid story, though it’s a pretty sharp example of the attitudes I complained about in the last “pain management” post on this blog.
This story recalls to me the advice given to people in life altering, or even agonizing pain who need help with breakthrough chronic pain, who are advised not to be testy but “polite and nice”, or how they just have to suck up the suspicion and lack of pain relief if they have allergies or contraindications to Nsaids.
….That sort of tightrope walking expected from miserable, anxious people. which really means that irritability and impatience, always present in those in pain, must be concealed. They must deceive. Play a game. Try hard to appear calm or be denied. Be too nice, and be denied or suspected.
Somehow, gatekeeping from drugs has become too important. I don’t care whose fault it is, so long as this is corrected. If it means addicts get all the meds they want online, without any medical indication, well great. I hope they die. Or just feel good. Or whatever they want. Sick people will still want to do it right, and to have doctor’s treat them.
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