Medical response to an autistic persons pain

I have recently been suffering dental problems. Because I have difficulty with waiting rooms and medical facilities in general, I was attempting self treatment untill the pain exceeded my pain tolerance threshold. I took every pain pill I could find to no effect. This happened in the early hours of the morning shortly before the new year. I was alternating between running up and down my flat punching walls and siting on the floor crying. I walked five miles across the city to A+E to seek help. Before I could enter the hospital, I struggled for maybe twenty minutes to achieve a calm demeanour. I waited there for three hours and all the help I recieved was a Ibuprofen which I had already taken to a near overdose and found ineffective. I believe I had a genuine clinical need for serious pain relief, but was unable to persuade the staff to take the severity of the pain seriously or to elict empathy for said pain and as a result recieved profoundly insufficient treatment.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Are there in existence or planning guidelines for accurately assessing an Autistic persons pain?

Parents
  • Former Member
    Former Member

    One problem with pitching up at A&E is that they will get a regular stream of people who will "demand" very strong pain killers. Many of these will be substance abusers and the A&E staff wouldn't know you well enough to tell you apart from them. I'm guessing that you were very agitated and possibly not the easiest customer they had to deal with?

    Put it down to experience and try to avoid getting into the same situation in future.

Reply
  • Former Member
    Former Member

    One problem with pitching up at A&E is that they will get a regular stream of people who will "demand" very strong pain killers. Many of these will be substance abusers and the A&E staff wouldn't know you well enough to tell you apart from them. I'm guessing that you were very agitated and possibly not the easiest customer they had to deal with?

    Put it down to experience and try to avoid getting into the same situation in future.

Children
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