I heard one man exclaim in a packed hospital waiting room. "It's her damn job. She took an oath." I was struck by his sense of entitlement. And I could envision how, enhanced by withdrawal and desperation, it could turn violent.
In the past, we’ve flung opioids at the problem, and haven’t developed alternatives.
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The real solution would have been for Prince to have received treatment for his drug problem, which by this time was a far bigger issue than his somatic pain.
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Too many doctors worry about “those people” showing up in the waiting room. They don’t particularly want to be known as a resource for the addicted.
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There’s no blood test, no scan to aid diagnosis. Knowing intellectually that one in ten will succumb is very little help; it has no practical value in terms of predicting an individual outcome.
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Try thinking of the interaction between drug seeker and practitioner as type of negotiation where the two parties have very different goals.
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There are just too many different forms of manipulation for any of us to be uniformly good at identifying them on the fly.
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One sign of vulnerability: the place tended to be too busy or too slow.
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Here was a physician who regularly committed an assortment of crimes without considering himself a criminal. To his way of thinking, he was the victim.
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There’s no shortage of stories among nurses and doctors about a friend or family member who went through treatment and relapsed, perhaps many times.
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Just tracking alone seems to significantly reduce reliance on opioids.
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It’s no accident (physicians) choose this often challenging work, and it genuinely bothers them when they can’t relieve a patient’s discomfort.
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It becomes easier to dash off a prescription for Oxy than to argue with a determined patient.
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