Most Frequent Emergency Room Patients Are Drug Addicts
Sunday, May 18, 2014 - 09:50
in Health & Medicine
The vast majority of so-called "super-frequent user" patients who seek care in the Emergency Department - a patient is considered a super-frequent user if they visit the emergency room at least 10 times a year - have a substance abuse addiction, according to a Henry Ford Hospital analysis. ER physicians have long said that patients who frequent the ER for their care have a substance abuse addiction but few studies have actually measured the rate of addiction of these patients. The findings presented Saturday at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) annual meeting in Dallas found that super-frequent users seeking pain-relief narcotics were more often women. The study's key findings: read more