Emergency Medicine Reports – December 26, 2004
December 26, 2004
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Dealing with Drug-Seeking Patients in the Emergency Department
Drug-seeking behaviors are commonplace in emergency departments. Many physicians have faced patients with multiple alleged allergies to narcotics who are asking for a medication that the physician never would have initially thought of prescribing, whose medications were stolen, and who become angry, threatening, and agitated upon refusal to refill the stolen prescription. This article defines various terms used in the drug-seeking literature, provides an overview of drug-seeking behaviors, and proposes some techniques to manage these patients both at the individual and at the institutional levels.