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The Emergency Medicine Physician Essay Essay

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On a busy Monday evening, the emergency medicine physician I was working with started to get a history from our 52-year-old male patient who presented asking for a refill on his pain medication. As more information was gathered, it was revealed that the patient had run out of his medication two months earlier and had yet to set up an appointment with his primary care physician. The physician bluntly cut the patient off, informing him that he needed to make an appointment with his primary care physician, as he would not be refilling the prescription due to the department’s policy of not refilling narcotic prescriptions. The patient became very enraged at this news. The physician then promptly left the room as a result. As we exited, the patient began spitting at us, then he quickly left the department while loudly swearing at the doctor. Personally, this patient-provider interaction was one of the first interactions that made me truly start to critically analyze what the term medical professionalism meant and what the responsibilities of a medical professional consisted of.
At first, I started contemplating whether the patient was right to be upset or if my physician was correct with his treatment toward the man. Immediately, my first thought was that obviously the physician was right as this patient was just enraged because he could not have his narcotics. However, as I recalled the event in my head, it just did not sit right with me. Since no one left the situation happy,

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