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Medical response to an autistic persons pain

outraged

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

    outraged said:

    I think there is a real issue here. The medical profession measures pain on the pain scale by comparing facial expressions and body language to a chart. Given that persons with ASVs often exhibit non-standard body-language, such a method is surely unsuitable?

    Not sure if they use a chart or if they gain experience from their own lives and during training and when they are doing the job. The biggest variation will come between people who can communicate well and those that can't. The ones that can't communicate get little sympathy because they are frequently drunk or on drugs. You would have been incorrectly classified, alongside the other people who were unable to communicate well, as a troublesome nuisance. If you want to avoid this in future then you may have to seek out an advocate who would help you negotiate any confusion.

    Of course, Catch-22 dictates that the people who most need an advocate are the least able persuade someone to give them an advocacy service.

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  • Former Member
    Former Member

    outraged said:

    I think there is a real issue here. The medical profession measures pain on the pain scale by comparing facial expressions and body language to a chart. Given that persons with ASVs often exhibit non-standard body-language, such a method is surely unsuitable?

    Not sure if they use a chart or if they gain experience from their own lives and during training and when they are doing the job. The biggest variation will come between people who can communicate well and those that can't. The ones that can't communicate get little sympathy because they are frequently drunk or on drugs. You would have been incorrectly classified, alongside the other people who were unable to communicate well, as a troublesome nuisance. If you want to avoid this in future then you may have to seek out an advocate who would help you negotiate any confusion.

    Of course, Catch-22 dictates that the people who most need an advocate are the least able persuade someone to give them an advocacy service.

Children
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