An article published in STAT this week asks this simple but devastating question: “When IV opioids are in short supply at the hospital, who gets pain relief?”
“When there is not enough pain medicine to go around, who gets it? The teenager in agony after a crushed leg, or the 80-year-old down the hall dying an excruciating death from cancer?” write the authors – Parker Crutchfield, professor, medical ethics, humanities and law at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine; Casey Chmura, a second-year resident in the J. Willis Hurst Internal Medicine Residency Program, and Abram Brummett, assistant professor of medical humanities and clinical bioethics at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine.
They write that with medication shortages, especially in terms of opioids, now a “routine feature of American health care,” an “ethical framework for distributing pain medication” is necessary. That framework, they write, must be “grounded in minimizing the worst suffering and doing so fairly.”
The authors conclude, “We can continue leaving clinicians to make impossible decisions arbitrarily and capriciously, or we can acknowledge that relieving pain is one of medicine’s core obligations — one that deserves the same foresight, planning, and ethical clarity we bring to any other scarce medical resources.”
Read their full article here.
