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From: anderson@uwmacc.UUCP (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: Aspirin vs. Codine
Message-ID: <372@uwmacc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 17-Oct-86 17:58:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: uwmacc.372
Posted: Fri Oct 17 17:58:46 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Oct-86 00:02:27 EDT
References: <1823@bu-cs.bu-cs.BU.EDU> <529@cci632.UUCP> <21708@rochester.ARPA>
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Organization: UWisconsin-Madison Academic Comp Center
Lines: 52



> > In article <1823@bu-cs.bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
> > >A few years ago I had surgery. I was in a fair amount of pain afterwards
> > >(I was basically bed-ridden for several days.) The doctor had given me
> > >codeine pills which kind of wiped me out but did little to reduce the
> > >pain (I sort of laid there and complained more slowly.)
> > >
> 
>   Often I've heard first hand experience of people experiencing post operative
> pain with little or no relief from their prescribed pain medication.  
> This is frightening to know that you can be in a great deal of pain, letting
> the nurses and doctors in on this and yet you still get no relief.  In one
> instance, a person who was in a great deal of pain received a pain pill every
> four hours.  But within an hour or so after the pill, the pain was back to
> its' full intensity with no relief in sight for the next 3 hours no matter 
> how much complaining was voiced.  
>   My question is this, does a person confined to a hospital bed in a modern
> hospital have any rights?  Do patients have to endure pain while their crys
> go unheard. [...rest edited out; similar in tone and thrust.]

While there may be cases in which indifference exists on the part
of the caregivers, you should give them a bit more credit than
you're doing here. Quite often there really isn't anything for
pain, and sometimes the drugs have *very* unpleasant side effects.
Would you rather have *just* the pain, or have the pain *and*
wilder hallucinations than you can imagine and total sleeplessness?
The graphic unpleasantness of this situation came home to me a while
ago while reading accounts of Vietnam vets, one of whom had been
hit by a "bouncing betty" mine, lost an arm and a leg, and was
*besides that* (if you can imagine!) badly wounded. He had three
dozen surgeries. Needless to say, analgesics were not up to the
circumstances he faced. There was nothing for him to do but go
on living *in spite of* the suffering.

I'm not hog-wild about some aspects of the medical profession, and
I've known some practitioners I thought were *monstrously* insensitive,
but I think most people who have to care for people in terrible pain
*do* care and try to do what can be done to alleviate suffering. Let
me say this, too: it costs them in stress and a thousand other ways
to be highly trained and yet unable to help. There is a dangerous
tendency, and it seems to me to be a growing one, to feel that doctors
(really, all "experts") have some kind of magic powers. Mostly, they're
just like you and me, except they have different work. For myself,
I wouldn't want their responsibilities for the world...
-- 
==ARPA:====================anderson@unix.macc.wisc.edu===Jess Anderson======
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==Words are not just blown air. They have a meaning.=====(Chuang Tsu)=======