Doctors' Ignorance Stands In The Way Of Care For The Disabled
Something curious was happening in the emergency room. Eight patients had come in within minutes of each other. Almost instantly, the junior resident, two interns and a medical student signed up for all of the them – except for one.
Half an hour passed, then an hour. As the senior resident doctor at the time, I supervised the others as they tended to the middle-aged man with chest pain, the elderly woman with a broken wrist and the teenage girl with a sore throat.
New patients kept coming in, and they, too, were seen quickly.
Still, there was that one patient everyone seemed to avoid, a man in his 20s with back pain. I watched as the medical student picked up his chart, then placed it back on the rack. Nurses, too, weren't going to his room. Finally, I assigned a team to care for him.
"We drew the short straw here," I overheard the nurse say.
The resident sighed. "I already ordered labs and an X-ray. It's going to take too long to examine him, so let's just get this started."
What was different about this patient? Was it a dangerous, contagious disease? A mental health problem marked by a violent streak? A history of weekly drunken visits to the ER?
No. All he had was a wheelchair.
He had been in a car accident five years before and was paralyzed from the waist down. He told me that he was used to waiting, to being the patient that providers avoided. His back pain was from a kidney infection, and it turned out that all he needed was an antibiotic.
Read the full article at NPR
(http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/05/17/313015089/doctors-ignorance-stands-in-the-way-of-care-for-the-disabled)
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