Chicago Med season 5, episode 13 takeaways: Pain Is For The Living
Chicago Med showcased controversial decisions in Pain Is For The Living. Look deeper into the episode with our Chicago Med season 5, episode 13 takeaways.
The latest Chicago Med may have been one of the show’s most controversial episodes, so what can we take away from an episode where there were several difficult choices to make?
“Pain Is For The Living” saw Dr. Daniel Charles (Oliver Platt) come up with a drastic solution to a psychiatric problem, while Dr. Will Halstead (Nick Gehlfuss) ended up in a precarious position with regards to his career versus his patient care. And who made a life-altering mistake?
SPOILER ALERT: This postmortem contains detailed spoilers from the latest Chicago Med episode. If you haven’t seen the entire episode, you can catch up with our recap here.
Here are the biggest takeaways from this week’s Chicago Med and why they’re moments you need to know. Let us know your thoughts about this episode in the comments at the end of this article.
1. Did Charles go too far?
The scene: Dr. Charles deduces that Jamie needs to be committed to a psychiatric facility in order to get proper treatment for his “multiple” disorders that lead him to lashing out violently at others. However, neither Jamie’s parents’ medical insurance nor Medicare will cover the high cost of full-time psychiatric care. So Charles convinces the parents that if they abandon their son, and allow him to become a ward of the state of Illinois, the state will get Jamie the proper care. The episode ends with Jamie’s parents and his younger brother leaving Chicago Med without him.
The takeaway: This is a moment that deserves to be talked about, and One Chicago fans will have very different opinions. It may have been a medically sound decision, but was it a morally sound one? On one hand, Jamie is (allegedly) going to get the treatment that he needs—after all, while Dr. Charles says that’s what’s going to happen, he doesn’t control Child Protective Services. But on the other, this has the potential to hurt as much as help.
There’s just something incredibly wrong about not only parents abandoning their child, but having a doctor advocate for it. Even if it’s with good motives, it leaves a terrible taste in one’s mouth. It also seems a little too easy. We don’t know when Jamie would be reunited with his parents; there is Dr. Charles’ promise that they’ll find a way to keep the parents in touch, but what does that mean? Will they be able to visit him in the psychiatric hospital? And what effect will all this have on him? Even if he gets help and comes out okay, he’s never going to forget that his parents left him behind. That’s the kind of thing that stays with someone forever.
This plotline felt like Chicago Med going a step too far, creating additional drama to give a tough story that extra bit of dramatic impact. It would have been more believable and more rewarding if Charles had been able to find a solution. It’s not the same when he passes a patient off to another doctor, and then adding the child abandonment element just made it even harder to swallow.