Suppose a longtime heroin addict gets in an accident. He’s got quite a tolerance, so even after giving him a normal dose of morphine, he’s still screaming in pain.
Will they keep upping the dosage until he feels better, or will they simply let him suffer? If the former, is there an upper limit to how much of the good stuff they’ll pump into him?
This incident has actually happened to someone I know. He was an IV drug user and just so happened to be the guitarist in my band. Anyways, he went to the hospital because he had some sort of operation on his kidneys and they used this biodegradable type tube to connect something in his back. I’m not a Doctor, so I don’t kno the details. When this tube twisted in his back, it caused him EXTREME and unbearable pain.
Welp, he went into the hospital and the ER doc happened to know his predicament and told the nurse to go ahead with some Morphine. But the thing was, the nurse gave him 20mg or whatever it was and he was still in excruciating pain. He told them that he was and still is an IV drug user. The nurse told him that she couldn’t give him anymore by law until another four hours. SHE stated that it was a law for her as a nurse practitioner. So I asked him, “so what did they do?” He said that the doctor came in with a syringe and gave him a shot of liquid demerol that put him in lala land.
So they will sometimes go to another type of drug since they can’t legally give a patient more than the recommended dosage. Now I’m sure there are Docs that look past this issue, but it’s probably not gonna be talked about much.