As an Emergency Room Nurse for 5 years, and a Critical Care Nurse for 3, I still think the most harmful disease by far is prescription drug abuse. And with the advent of patient satisfaction driving revenue for vastly underpaid hospitals, prescription narcotic abuse has become a public threat. I have seen Percocet get prescribed to people with chronic back pain, abdominal pain with no known cause, chronic "fibromyalgia", and ovarian cysts that have ruptured months and sometimes years ago. I've seen patients receive up to 30 pills at a time, some people I see back a few days later, looking for more narcotics. I really think this is a symptom of our everything-right-now society, and I think it's probably the most harmful thing we as healthcare workers are doing to patients. A lot of Emergency room physicians have become drug dealers. They get asked for by name, because they order the right combination of Dilaudid, Phenergan and Benadryl, with a Percocet or Vicodin prescription to go home with. The entire practice has become exactly against what modern medicine was meant to stand for in the first place.
I would like to do something about this. I'm writing this to see if there are any nurses with kindred spirits out there who would like to help. I'm envisioning a letter-writing campaign to Washington, and to your state senators, followed by a public campaign/education project to really teach society how bad/insidious these narcotics really are. I think a large group of nurses is what it will take to get this issue under control; the public still trusts nurses more than any other professional. Anyone with me? Feel free to pm me or reply to this thread with any comments.
