Two friends of friends both had the back luck suffer serious injuries in separate incidents. One went to the ER, was told he was unharmed but sent to follow up with his doctor - who discovered he had a broken neck (obviously must have been a hairline fracture since he was walking around). The ER did not even given him pain pills.
The second happened to a woman who was sent to the ER in an ambulance unable to move. A triage nurse examined her, told she was fine, just being a big baby ordered her to leave. The fof could not get up, and finally a doctor was called in - who discovered she had a broken back. Oh a third case. A friend suffers extreme migraines, bad enough that a pain management specialist made arrangements for her to be able to go to an ER and receive intramuscular dialud. (Can't be self-administered.) He had his orders backed up by a doctor on the ER staff, filed permanently. Her experience: a lot of the time the ER would refuse to administer the dialud, insisting on trying other treatments the pain specialist had already tried with her which did not work. In others they would insist on starting with a lower dose than the prescription "just to see if that does the trick". She was a black woman you see, and the ER staff just assumed that there was a good chance a black woman getting strong pain meds was a junkie trying to scam the system. Doctors prescriptions: maybe she had conned the doctors. Maybe the doctors were acting as Dr. Feelgoods. But leaving someone in excruciating agony that measured on official pain scales as a multiple of childbirth pain was worthwhile, cause they weren't 100% sure that she was not a junkie. Racism, sexism and war on some drugs combine to torment a really nice woman. We desperately need single payer. Without it we are unlikely to fix any of the systemic problem. But finance and administration are not the only level at which our health care system is broken. Once single payer is in place, we have a hell of a lot of other messes to tackle. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
