However, it seems that every hospital has roaming doctors that look at patients' bedside records and prescribe something so that they can get a bit of the insurance money.
Some idiot doctor saw that my father was in pain and told the nurses to give him morphine. He went temporarily insane and was put in the hospital's psych ward.
It took us several days to convince everyone that it was the morphine and that my father was not crazy.
Fortunately the entire episode took less than a week and within the walls of a single hospital, but it was still disconcerting.
Exact same thing happened to me but with Fentanyl.
Do not EVER let anybody put this in your drip.
We have an elderly uncle who goes “insane” when he gets a UTI. Several visiting docs have made mistakes with his *diagnosis*...that’s why we try to keep our notes/binder and a family member present at all times. Once the antibiotics are started, he gets back to his old happy self, rather quick.
For three days we fought with the physicians while my father, who was a brilliant articulate man, sat in his bed and drooled, and messed himself if you didn't get him to the bathroom. Imagine having an in depth conversation with a man regarding social science and politics and then feeding him and wiping him the next day.
Neurologists insisted that he had had a stroke. My poor mother fought tooth and nail for them to take him off the morphine and they treated her terribly up to the moment they physically shoved her.
At that point I unleashed the hounds as it were and went straight to the top using the words liability and litigation in every sentence. They took him off the morphine and within three hours, he was back to himself.
This is what we learned. Do not leave a loved one unattended in a hospital and question, question, question everything. There are wonderful health care providers out there; but there are also arrogant ignorant jacka**es.
I’ve been hospitalized three times for heart problems. All three times some Korean gastro doctor stopped by my room. I have no idea why he was there. He billed the insurance company and was paid. He billed me for the co-pays. I wrote him a letter basically telling him to go to hell. I never heard from him again.