Nursing Informatics · Clinical Perspectives · Healthcare Systems
"The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be
distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed
according to medical need."
— JAMA (2003), 290, 798
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Addiction phobia
April 13, 2010 -- Working my clinical rotations this semester
I saw first-hand in the suffering of a patient our medical system's
dysfunctional approach to pain management. This young man suffers
from a gastrointestinal condition that is painful and cannot be
cured. Yet his doctors will not give him ongoing opiate analgesics,
the only thing that enables him to get through a day relatively
pain-free. They do prescribe these drugs for his acute episodes but
then they send him home with non-opiates that, he says, "...do not
touch the pain."
Evidently, the concern is that he might become addicted. But I
wonder, so what? He has the disease for life, why not the treatment
for it, too, for life? I cannot second-guess the doctors but I can
commiserate with his frustration.
