Observation

I work with patients all the time. What I notice is the attitude change from patients when something goes wrong with their pain medicine. We have been monitoring one of our patients recently because we notice that he is always requesting early refills before he has an appointment with this doctor. He comes in every month to get evaluated or for pain refills. He came in this time. He thinks his appointment is today, but he actually missed it last week. He complains about how he never receives a reminder call from us. I explain to him that reminder calls are courtesy calls. He will not get that all the time. The patient has become like a friend to me, but he doesn’t seem to understand that if you miss your appointment with the doctor you will have to wait until the next available appointment. Usually this patient is really nice to me, he always comes in with a smile and greeting my kindly. He was completely out of his medication this time. The patient is no longer being friendly with me. I told him the only thing I could do is leave a note for the doctor to read and call him back. The patient gets more frustrated as I explain to him the consequences. He starts to yell out and frightening the patients around. I ask to him to be polite and respectful to us and others. The patient think that by him acting this way he will somehow get a hold of his medications, but that is not how it works. Unfortunately, because he becomes violent due to the fact that he cannot obtain his medication is a sign that this patient might be an addict. He is asked to step into the clinic director’s room and they discuss over the consequences of his acts and how the doctor can stop prescribing his medication. We also start doing more studies to see if the patient has actually become an addict and take other measures to help him.