Thursday, August 13, 2015

The Pain Medication Conundrum - How Are To Physicians Deal With Subjective Pain Patients?

Stuart Isett for The New York Times
The New York Times has a well done opinion-editorial article entitled "The Pain Medication Conundrum" by Dr. Danielle Ofri about the challenges faced by physicians who are asked to prescribe pain medication. Here are some excerpts from the article:  
"Here it was again: the dreaded pain conundrum. A patient requests a strong pain medication and the doctor has to figure out whether the request is legitimate. This is an aggravating situation on many levels. On the individual level, there are the immediate issues of trust — do I trust Mr. W.’s story, and, conversely, how will my decision affect Mr. W.’s trust in me?"

"Then there is the larger issue of how we doctors treat pain in general. A 2011 report from the Institute of Medicine highlighted how poorly the medical field handles pain. Undertreating pain, we are admonished, violates the basic ethical principles of medicine. On the other hand, we are lambasted for overprescribing pain medications, enabling addicts and creating an epidemic of overdose deaths."

"What are doctors to do? Pain is a subjective symptom. There is no instrument to indicate its severity. All that a doctor has is the patient’s word."


"For patients with chronic pain, especially those with syndromes that don’t fit into neat clinical boxes, being judged by doctors to see if they “merit” medication is humiliating and dispiriting. It’s equally dispiriting for doctors. This type of judgment, with its moral overtones and suspicions, is at odds with the doctor-patient relationship we work to develop."

This is going to be an issue for some years as prescription drug addiction has grown into a national health crisis. Patients with chronic pain who take these medications are not classically "addicts" even though they are reliant on these medications because they are seeking it for pain relief. Then there are addicts. How do physicians tell the difference? Years ago the medical community urged physicians to treat pain. Pain was undertreated. Now physicians are running scared. Physicians need to have new protocols and learn from those who have been too trusting of patients.



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