Medical god complex is when you declare that the only valid judge of pain and the utility of its treatment is the medical establishment and disregard the humanity of the patient altogether. Physicians are not moral arbiters. They have an obligation to informed consent, not dictatorial control. If a patient's pain is such that they cannot live with it and they have been given a reasonable and measured explanation of the danger of pain medication and how to use it in the least harmful way possible, it is then their choice what should be done. Not yours.
That patient went to that hospital for their staff's judgement. They can just as easily walk out at any time and go anywhere else under any other standards. I had a special AMA form just for it and gave them out routinely without any affront to my god complex. If multiple hospitals under multiple sets of protocols are denying the treatment that the patient wants, there's a reason for that which puts a wrench in using it the least harmful way possible. Using it might do more harm because of some set of factors not clear to me, you, or the patient themselves unless they're reading journals. Informed consent is so basically critical to routine medicine that I got it for everything I did. A dozen times repairing a wound. If they want to walk out at any point for any reason they can just do so and the only time they're stopped is when they aren't capable of forming informed consent. There is absolutely no disregard for their humanity, only the attempt to find the best path of restoring their functionality without risking extra damage unnecessarily. They have to fully consent to what's done and face no penalties for challenging what's declined and getting other opinions.
This did not, in fact, address my statement in any way. Your line is still 'if daddy medicine says no, then that's that', but with more steps. You should be honest with yourself about that fact. It will improve your ability to engage in self-criticism.
I learned a long time ago that trusting doctors is a terrible idea, after doing so nearly killed me because the infection that was increasingly risking my life was less important to the doctors seeing me (and giving me useless treatments repeatedly with zero effective communication at multiple hospitals ) than it was to me. The idea that the medical establishment can be trusted to make the right decision for an individual is, frankly, laughable. Instead, it is incumbent on the patient to go read those very journals and try to parse them for themself in order to reasonably be able to challenge physicians in order to ensure that they actually get the help they need. Hell, I need to have a discussion with my own neurologist about why I'm being prescribed a medicine that no studies I can find show effectiveness for in treating chronic sciatica (which, at least in my case, is effectively not treatable by fucking anything, it seems) next week.
Look, I have no idea what was going on with this guy's back. If this was nervous pain, odds are opiates would have done jack shit anyway. But if it was, he also wouldn't be likely to be very mobile. But medical privacy being what it is, we're never going to know that (and that's okay). Maybe this guy was a victim of legitimate malpractice. Maybe he was just unable to cope with pain and decided to take it out of his doctor. What we do know is that despite the incredibly toxic social stigma on opiate use, people are going to find and use opiates if they think they need them. If the hospital thinks that its procedure is safer than the patient going out and finding opiates where they can be found, I'd suggest that they are dangerously wrong about that. The hydrocodone that the Hospital prescribes is a hell of a lot safer than the shit you can get on the streets, which is almost universally cut with Fentanyl these days. But if I'm in unbearable pain and I can't get other relief, I'm sure as fuck not going to be concerned with a Doctor who thinks they know better than me what I can bear. I'm gonna buy that street shit and take the risk. Because that Doctor literally cannot know what I am able or unable to bear.
Have you ever been in so much pain that you seriously considered suicide to escape it? I have. Luckily, my current Doctor is a good one who actually understood my pain was unbearable for me, and she worked with me to get me short-term relief while we tried to find a long-term solution. If she hadn't, I'd have probably done it. The short-term relief was a higher-end anti-inflammatory injection on an annoyingly regular cadence, instead of opiates, because opiates would have done absolutely nothing for me (pain without Dilaudid? 10/10. Pain with Dilaudid? 10/10, but now with wooziness), but if I'd needed opiates to control the pain and she'd refused me, I'd be dead today, because I was well past what I could bear. Your argument leaves alternate universe me just as dead as if I'd overdosed.
Medical god complex is when you declare that the only valid judge of pain and the utility of its treatment is the medical establishment and disregard the humanity of the patient altogether. Physicians are not moral arbiters. They have an obligation to informed consent, not dictatorial control. If a patient's pain is such that they cannot live with it and they have been given a reasonable and measured explanation of the danger of pain medication and how to use it in the least harmful way possible, it is then their choice what should be done. Not yours.
That patient went to that hospital for their staff's judgement. They can just as easily walk out at any time and go anywhere else under any other standards. I had a special AMA form just for it and gave them out routinely without any affront to my god complex. If multiple hospitals under multiple sets of protocols are denying the treatment that the patient wants, there's a reason for that which puts a wrench in using it the least harmful way possible. Using it might do more harm because of some set of factors not clear to me, you, or the patient themselves unless they're reading journals. Informed consent is so basically critical to routine medicine that I got it for everything I did. A dozen times repairing a wound. If they want to walk out at any point for any reason they can just do so and the only time they're stopped is when they aren't capable of forming informed consent. There is absolutely no disregard for their humanity, only the attempt to find the best path of restoring their functionality without risking extra damage unnecessarily. They have to fully consent to what's done and face no penalties for challenging what's declined and getting other opinions.
This did not, in fact, address my statement in any way. Your line is still 'if daddy medicine says no, then that's that', but with more steps. You should be honest with yourself about that fact. It will improve your ability to engage in self-criticism.
I learned a long time ago that trusting doctors is a terrible idea, after doing so nearly killed me because the infection that was increasingly risking my life was less important to the doctors seeing me (and giving me useless treatments repeatedly with zero effective communication at multiple hospitals ) than it was to me. The idea that the medical establishment can be trusted to make the right decision for an individual is, frankly, laughable. Instead, it is incumbent on the patient to go read those very journals and try to parse them for themself in order to reasonably be able to challenge physicians in order to ensure that they actually get the help they need. Hell, I need to have a discussion with my own neurologist about why I'm being prescribed a medicine that no studies I can find show effectiveness for in treating chronic sciatica (which, at least in my case, is effectively not treatable by fucking anything, it seems) next week.
Look, I have no idea what was going on with this guy's back. If this was nervous pain, odds are opiates would have done jack shit anyway. But if it was, he also wouldn't be likely to be very mobile. But medical privacy being what it is, we're never going to know that (and that's okay). Maybe this guy was a victim of legitimate malpractice. Maybe he was just unable to cope with pain and decided to take it out of his doctor. What we do know is that despite the incredibly toxic social stigma on opiate use, people are going to find and use opiates if they think they need them. If the hospital thinks that its procedure is safer than the patient going out and finding opiates where they can be found, I'd suggest that they are dangerously wrong about that. The hydrocodone that the Hospital prescribes is a hell of a lot safer than the shit you can get on the streets, which is almost universally cut with Fentanyl these days. But if I'm in unbearable pain and I can't get other relief, I'm sure as fuck not going to be concerned with a Doctor who thinks they know better than me what I can bear. I'm gonna buy that street shit and take the risk. Because that Doctor literally cannot know what I am able or unable to bear.
Have you ever been in so much pain that you seriously considered suicide to escape it? I have. Luckily, my current Doctor is a good one who actually understood my pain was unbearable for me, and she worked with me to get me short-term relief while we tried to find a long-term solution. If she hadn't, I'd have probably done it. The short-term relief was a higher-end anti-inflammatory injection on an annoyingly regular cadence, instead of opiates, because opiates would have done absolutely nothing for me (pain without Dilaudid? 10/10. Pain with Dilaudid? 10/10, but now with wooziness), but if I'd needed opiates to control the pain and she'd refused me, I'd be dead today, because I was well past what I could bear. Your argument leaves alternate universe me just as dead as if I'd overdosed.