When I finished my training at the trade school for medical assistants, my Externship was at a pain management clinic. I got to see firsthand how bad things were for the Opioid Epidemic.
I had to bring patients to the back room, take their vitals, do an updated paper on their charts, ask them where it hurt, and how to rank their pain on a scale of 1 to 10, like you said. The weirdest patients I got had pain that fluctuated all over their bodies, as well as up and down the pain scale. One patient hurt all over, so I listed everything from head to toe, where it hurt on that body part, and how high or low the pain was. Most were pretty nice, and came from all walks of life, and the doc was very nice to them. He used both modern methods, as well as working on helping them control their pain through "mind over matter" stuff.
What really disturbed me, though, was how the patients behaved at the end of their appointments, particularly when we had a weekly meeting of 10-15 patients. They were all in pain and anxious to get their prescriptions at the end of the meetings (which are mandatory). They were like angry, anxious, impatient kids that wanted their candy really bad.
Another thing that disturbed me was when the office would discover through urine tests that some of their patients were breaking the law. Once every few weeks, their patients had to take a urine test (and pay for it), which was required by the law, and they had to have results that showed the medicine was in their sample, in the right dosage, as well as only any other prescriptions they were taking. Sadly, two issues the office would run into was a.) the patient would start using illegal drugs in addition to their pain meds, or b.) they weren't using the medication at all and selling it on the street. I don't know what they did with Group B, but Group A was dismissed immediately, forever, and sent to rehab. First day I was there, everyone was shocked to discover a sweet little old lady patient they'd had for years had cocaine in her urine sample.
One thing that made me feel sorry for some of them was, many were on workman's comp. They seemed like nice, honest people that would have been happy to work for a living, but literally couldn't because of a severe injury of some sort. A few were even missing limbs!
One thing that gave me hope was when I was talking to a medical merchant who was visiting a few times, a guy whose product the doc was interested in too. The company the merchant represented was creating a safe alternative to opioid pain meds. Testing looked promising at that time, according to him. He told me that the volunteers were taking the same amount of the experimental pain med as when they started months earlier, whereas patients using current-day prescription opioids eventually develop a resistance and the doctors have to slowly up the dosage over time.
reply
share