How to reduce stress and suspicion when seeking chronic pain medications.
You’re a chronic pain patient who takes several prescription narcotics to control your symptoms. Then one weekend, excruciating pain lands you in the emergency room. there, a doctor grills you about your medications, in part to make sure that you’re a legitimate pain patient, not someone seeking drugs. What can you do to help the ER doctor to believe you?
It’s not always easy to tell chronic pain patients from drug-seeking patients, says Howard Blumstein, MD, FAAEM, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine and medical director of the North Carolina Baptist Hospital emergency room.
Patients with chronic pain visit the ER for various complaints, he says. “Some of these patients have demonstrable disease, like sickle cell disease or chronic pancreatitis. I think that physicians are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt when they come in and say they have pain.”
“Other patients are prone to have problems that you can never objectively demonstrate, like chronic back pain and chronic headaches,” he says. “We just have to take their word for it. You can’t look into anything and tell whether or not they’re actually having pain.”
Regardless of which group patients fall into, Blumstein says, “there are some patients who, because of their behavior or their frequent visits, still get labeled as being addicted to drugs or abusing drugs.”
What type of behavior raises suspicions? “Patients will come in and be very demanding, get into fights with doctors and nurses because they don’t think they’re getting enough pain medicine, and that causes the health-care providers to become suspicious of the patient’s motives,” he says. or the patient may ask for a specific narcotic like Demerol, or say they’re allergic to non-narcotic pain relievers.
Understanding Suspicion in the Emergency Room
“In most cases, it’s probably unfair to the patient,” Blumstein says. but emergency room doctors have strong motivations to carefully screen out drug seekers. they want to thwart drug abuse and any chance that narcotics will be diverted, for example, sold to strangers, or exchanged for illegal substances. “They have a high street value,” Blumstein says.
ER doctors have one useful tool, though. Currently, 34 states have prescription drug monitoring programs that allow doctors to check a patient’s prescription history online. “I can look up a patient and see all the prescriptions that have been filled for controlled substances,” says Blumstein, who practices in North Carolina. Doctors can use the database to corroborate a patient’s story. or they might see patterns that warn them to probe further for drug abuse, for example, prescriptions from numerous physicians that have been filled at multiple pharmacies.
“It is an unbelievably great tool for physicians,” says Eduardo Fraifeld, MD, president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine.