I was denied sedation/effective pain meds before a procedure pretty recently. Despite the fact that I spent the entire time literally screaming in pain, they dismissed it as “anxiety” and did nothing to help.
I also received very little when I first came into the hospital - as my body was flooding with literal shit and I was fucking dying. They let me writhe and roll around for hours before they mercifully knocked me out for my operation.
I’m traumatized to the point where watching movies where people experiencing pain is upsetting. I was watching fucking Avatar the Last Airbender and wincing every time someone got punched or kicked.
I also go back to getting my IUD put in - again, another extremely painful procedure that is “not supposed to hurt” so there is no option for sedation or effective pain meds.
It feels like asking for pain meds gets you labeled as a drug seeker/addict too. I made the mistake of mentioning that I smoke weed (because I knew the anesthesiologist needs to know that) and it feels like it was instantly assumed that I’d be a pill popper too.
And I have extremely high pain tolerance. I’ve literally had people whip me until they’ve drawn blood. I’ve worked a fast food shift with a second degree (even a bit of third degree) burn going down the majority of my arm. I’m not a wuss, I know how to breathe in ways that help, I know how to go to a mind palace, but Christ, when you start digging around in someone’s guts with sharp objects, that’s not really something you can meditate away!
Is it training? Is it the fact that becoming a doctor in the U.S. requires the kind of upper middle class upbringing that doesn’t tend to help people develop empathy?
Probably just thanks to insurance companies yet again
Doctors don’t get to make their own decisions anymore, they’re paid more like car mechanics and get a “job rate”.
Change a tire? It’s billed at $28 bucks. Doesn’t matter if it takes you 10 minutes or an hour. Air and balancing is included. Anything extra you don’t get paid for.
Gotta put in an IUD? You get $500 for the job, included is one shot of pain meds, the IUD, and one set of sterile equipment. Pain meds not working so great on this patient? Insurance doesn’t pay for extra, outpatient center doesn’t get paid for it or has to fight insurance for it.
Same for novocaine in dental work.
Insurance is terrible.
This is marginally related but in case anyone else doesn’t know: dental procedures are not supposed to hurt.
I grew up terrified of dentists and ended up not going for nearly 10 years because of the fear/pain. I finally gave in when a tooth broke in half. The dentist I went to gave me the regular amount of numbing stuff and about 5 mins in saw in my face how much pain I was in and from then on she always gave me extra. I just have a high tolerance for the stuff and had never been receiving enough.
Wtf? No this is not normal. My wife even gets pain meds for the Dental Hygienist, because she has a fear for the dentist or anything dentist related. I think it is absolutely unnecessary, but maybe she has hyper sensutive teeth or something. I’m not a doctor. Anyways, the pain meds help her, so she gets them, regardless of whether it is just phychological or not.
I think you’re just suffering from the ridiculousness that calls itself the US healthcare system.
We’re in the throes of a few crisis in the US:
- a professional backlash against the over-prescription of opiates that were advertised as “non-addictive” which was actually a lie,
- the monster the above crisis created: a domestic population of drug addicts who are either seeking drugs themselves or looking to non-addicts to acquire them,
- constriction within the health insurance marketplace, demanding more and more justification for care and drug access,
- an entire political system that’s in the pocket of said industry who are incentivized to manufacture a world that maximizes health care spending while minimizing actual health care delivered.
You’re female which is a detriment to appropriate medical care, being non-white is also a detriment to care. As others note there are also various systematic and medical reasons a doctor may not prescribe or use pain-relievers especially prior to understanding the problem.
I will say you need a new ob/gyn as there are recent updates that make pain relief a standard for iud insertion.
My mother literally had a gynaecologist just tell her that they’re putting her under general anesthesia for a surgery where other clinics won’t because “we don’t believe in torturing our patients”.
Thank you to that clinic. We need so many more of those in the world.
NGL as a white guy I just have to ask nicely for the good drugs and they give me opioides, granted it’s for kidney stones and it’s the most pain I’ve ever experienced, but honestly it sounds better than whatever OP was going through.
I do think I present with classic pain symptoms, I litterally can’t form sentences, which might help.
Kidney stones are known as one of the most painful things, and knowing the problem means the pain is no longer important for diagnosis.
True, however the first time they gave me fentanyl before they did a CT scan, they had figured it was stones but only had my pain to go off, so I suspect I got better treatment than if i’d been an equally erratic POC or woman, but hope I’m wrong and they’d give everyone similar treatment.
My experience, also in the US, has been the opposite: I get prescribed addictive painkillers “just in case”.
Last time I had surgery, they told me to take ibuprofen for pain, and they also gave me a prescription for vicodin if the pain was too great. I live in an area with a significant opioid abuse problem, and they’re handing it out like candy. They didn’t tell me “call back if it’s severe” or anything like that, they just gave me the prescription. I stuck with the ibuprofen, and realistically I could have done without even that.
I suspect your experience is largely due to sexism. I’ve heard so many stories like this, where doctors don’t even think of taking women seriously.
You must be one of the Real People™ if you make above a certain amount of money or you have certain professions or if your family has a certain amount of money then you are considered a real human. Importantly you must also be male and cisgenderrd and heterosexual, though enough money can counteract these effects.
The reason that most humans are not considered Real People™ is because it’s the only way for folks nearer the top of the pyramid of social hierarchy to justify their existence. Poor folks and people who don’t have professional careers must be less than those at the top and the ones at the top must have special criteria that means every judgement they make must be better.
I used to be on disability and when I went in to see healthcare professionals I was basically treated like dirt and was never believed about anything I said. Then I went to law schools and suddenly everything I said mattered. It’s wild how much differently folks treat you when they think you are Real People™
There was a nurse in a fertility clinic who was an addict and replaced the fentanyl drip with saline. Multiple women experienced agony during the procedure for extracting eggs. That procedure was to insert a huge syringe into the vagina, through the vagina wall, into the ovaries to suck up some eggs.
Many women experienced this with no pain medication at all and their complaints, even their screams were dismissed. Needless to say, when the addict nurse was discovered, they felt pretty silly.
Doctors have incredible tolerance for the suffering of women.
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The side effects of medication can interfere with diagnosis and treatment
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Pain can be a useful diagnostic indicator itself
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They see people in pain all the time, so it doesn’t seem like an exceptional state to them
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People with low pain tolerance, and people feigning pain to get opiods, are overrepresented in the population of people seeking medical care, so experience conditions medical providers to assume that as a factor
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The classic case of:
We just discovered a new thing with a specific use, let’s sell it to EVERYBODY!
Turns out that the new thing is bad for people who don’t fit a specific use case, so in order to prevent the wrong people from getting it, we must stop offering it to the people that DO need it.
The doctors care. The shareholders dont
As others have said, it’s a backlash against the pill mills, we have overcorrected.
I get migraines occasionally, and have Imitrex shots for them. I love that drug because it is not at all druggy - it leaves me clear headed with no migraine, there is a nauseating unpleasant rush when administered, then it’s just like walking back in time, headache fades to nothing.
But a handful of times (like literally 6 times in 30 years) I get status migraine. Imitrex does not avail me, 4 days no food no water I will puke even a spoonful of water.
I used to be able to go to the doctor and get some shots with some opiate and fenergan. They would do one, I would still be puking and crying, they would come back every 20 minutes or so and do another until I was so far away from the pain it wasn’t bothering me. Then I could sleep and it worked every time, even though it did not work by killing the pain immediately (painkillers don’t work for migraine) the high plus sleep always worked. Maybe $50 -$100 total cost.
But the last two times I got this, the doctor couldn’t do that, it was outlawed. They sent me to the emergency room. Cold IV in a cold room, some advil stuff that doesn’t work, then send me home still hurting, can’t sleep, headache 2 more days but I don’t die from dehydration. $1,600 for a worse result.
I understand why they say the opiates don’t work for migraine, they don’t directly kill the pain. But the previous protocol worked, and with electronic health records, can they not tell this is a very infrequent event for me? I don’t even like downers. I just want the headache to break and that was the only protocol that ever worked.
ETA: and it is spotty - when I had surgery to repair my finger, the doctor gave me 50 pills of oxy, he said hands can hurt bad. But mine didn’t (and yeah I also have a tolerance for pain) and that many pills seem like enough to cause dependence, WTF? I kept a few for rescue med and tossed the rest.
To add to the backlash portion: doctors are monitored for what rxs and how many they write for controlled substances. Pharmacies are monitored for how many controlled substances they dole out. Some rural pharmacies will refuse to take on new patients with pain meds (ex: you have a recently-diagnosed cancer patient who lived in the middle of nowhere all their life, and they can’t get morphine because their local pharmacy refuses to take on another scheduled rx). Pain management typically dictates you get a few days at a time and have to be reassessed before you can get another rx, so that means throwing another one on to the pile for the doctor and pharmacy, which means more liability.
Source: spouse worked ambulatory trying to coordinate with bumfuck nowhere pharmacies to get cancer patients their meds.
Unfortunately this absolutely happens, both by doctors and nurses.
My mother experienced something similar at the hospital when she had an examination for a disc herniation.
She was told not whine so much about it despite it was extremely painful for her to move. After they had the results, and it turned out she had a HUGE one, they all suddenly changed completely, because they could se on the images how bad it really was.
They thought she had 2, but when she was operated, it turned out to be only one that was so big it looked like 2 on the imaging.Some doctors and nurses are assholes, that don’t respect their patients, and don’t believe when they have pains.
They just expect you to choke on some ibuprofen or paracetamol, same for most of the western Europe tbf, even if care is way more affordable
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