Furthering clinicians’ understandings of how daily practice can respond to Black patients' experiences can help restore trust and mitigate racial and ethnic health inequity.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(6):E480-486. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.480.
Beyond consensus that pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience,” its biology remains poorly understood, and options for its treatment remain frustratingly inadequate.
Medical education must acknowledge the problematic use of race as a biological or epidemiological risk factor in research and the controversy over race.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(6):518-527. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.6.peer1-1706.
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.
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.