Patients who seek relief at emergency departments for intense pain often experience long waits, receive inadequate treatment, and feel physicians did not take their symptoms seriously, according to MedPage Today reporting on presentations at the American Pain Society meeting. In one study of 842 patients who had come to the ED for out-of-control pain, only 61% of patients received analgesics, the mean wait time was 90 minutes, and staff typically did not reassess patients’ pain. Patients need to do a better job of communicating pain to ED staff, said the researcher, but ED physicians are also at fault for discharging 40% of the patients who continued to have pain. An online study of 258 patients conducted by the American Pain Society found that 47% described their ED experience as “poor,” “terrible,” or “the worst experience of my life.” Twenty-one percent of pain patients waited more than three hours to be treated, 30% said the ED physician didn’t believe they were in severe pain, and only 44% of patients said they were treated with dignity. ED physicians, say pain experts, often don’t have a good understanding of pain, and they react suspiciously to reports of chronic pain, suspecting that the patient is abusing pain drugs.
