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.
When communicating with patients with whom they do not share the same first language or ethnic background, physicians should be aware of possible prejudice or resistance on the part of the patient and do everything possible to assure that the patient can listen and participate effectively, even if that means adding another professional of the patient's ethnicity to the conversation.
Patricia D. Quigley, MD and Megan A. Moreno, MD, MSEd, MPH
Maintaining an adolescent’s confidentiality while answering his or her parents’ questions about their child’s change in mood and behavior can be challenging.
Katherine E. Clarridge, Ernest A. Fischer, Andrea R. Quintana, and James M. Wagner, MD
An argument is made for integrating Spanish language instruction into education of the interdisciplinary health care team, if not into the medical education of physicians per se.
Mary Terrell White, PhD and Katherine L. Cauley, PhD
Students who take international electives must be sensitive to the impact of their presence and to possible risks to patients' safety and their own, and must ask whether their motives for going abroad are overly self-serving.
Increased awareness and improvement in access are needed in order to alleviate the racial disparities that exist with regard to the underutilization of hospice care by African Americans and other ethnic populations.