I can’t disagree with him on this action either, especially since we all have health insurance now. Ok just a little sarcasm there....
But truly, if they are writing a 7-10 script for pain meds that is way too much to be walking out the ER door with. If one is still in that much pain post 3 days, one needs to be seen by a regular doctor for further treatment or should be admitted for further diagnostic care.
I agree to some extent but then I wonder if an ER doc proscribes you only a few day supply of an opiate pain killer and then you go to your primary care doctor a few days later and he writes you another partial or full scrip for the same pain killer, that you won’t end up in some data base as a “doctor shopper”.
And I would add it may not always be necessary to follow up with a primary care doctor after a visit to the ER for some types of injury if it doesn’t require follow up or further treatment and it can sometimes take a week or more to be seen by a lot of primary care docs and even more by some specialists.
Back in around 2003, I a relative took me to the ER one evening because my back pain and back muscle spasms were so bad that I couldn’t stand up straight without severe pain – I initially didn’t want to go BTW, but she convinced me. The ER doc did an examination, asked a lot of questions and determined I had a “slipped disc” and a pinched nerve and the pain was causing the muscle spasms which in turn were exasperating the inflammation. He sent me home with an Rx for muscle relaxers (1 every 4 hours), Percocet (1 every 6 hours), enough for about 7 days and a steroid for the inflammation and at the ER gave me a shot of an anti-inflammatory drug. Boy those drugs knocked me out but they also worked. I ended up not taking all the muscle relaxers and Percocet, only took them for about 4 days and I did follow up with an orthopedic (I had to wait two weeks to be seen BTW). By the time I saw him I wasn’t in eructating pain anymore and didn’t need pain meds but he did write a new Rx for the muscle relaxers with instructions on when and how to take them and only if necessary and wrote a script for what he called “Back School”, i.e. physical therapy. If the ER doc had only wrote a script for a day or two worth of pain meds, considering how long it took to be seen by the ortho, I might have likely ended up back at the ER, missed more than 4 days of work and would have suffered needlessly. Just saying.