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.
Medical students who watch and try to emulate the techniques and behaviors of physicians on popular medical dramas can gain emotional knowledge about patients and about themselves.
The Culture, Narrative, and Medicine course at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine teaches cultural humility through literature and students' reflective writing.
An e-prescribing system can potentially assist physicians by offering essential information at the point of care and guide them to tailor the prescription for their patients' needs.