Beyond consensus that pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience,” its biology remains poorly understood, and options for its treatment remain frustratingly inadequate.
Reducing racial disparities in pain treatment requires an interdisciplinary approach to identifying causes of racial biases and teaching health care professionals to recognize and reduce them.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(3):221-228. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.3.medu1-1503.
Neal Sikka, MD, Tina Choudhri, MD, and Robert Jarrin, JD
Medical schools should integrate health IT and biomedical informatics into their formal curricula. The George Washington University Emergency Medicine Telemedicine and Digital Health Fellowship was designed to train graduate physicians to use telemedicine in their clinical and research work.
Nalini Vadivelu, MD, Sukanya Mitra, MD, MAMS, and Roberta L. Hines, MD
Inadequate education of primary care clinicians leads to inadequately treated pain, which has myriad dire consequences. To address this problem, education about pain management should be made a mandatory part of medical school curricula.
There are numerous state and federal laws designed to protect against misuse and diversion of prescription drugs that apply to patients' behavior, physicians' prescribing practices, and dispensing.