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Pain Management: Does Race Play a Role?

Have you ever wondered if certain factors caused provider bias in the realm of medical care..especially with respect to pain management? Today's post explores a study of racial factors in pain management.
A study conducted jointly by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis has found that patient race, provider bias, and clinical ambiguity interact to influence a provider's assessment and treatment decisions.  The researchers suggest that understanding these factors and their influence might be important in terms of improving patient care.  Their results were presented at the 2014 meeting of the American Pain Society in Tampa, Florida.

Dr. Adam Hirsh, a psychologist, and his colleagues studied 110 medical residents and their interactions with twelve computer simulated patients, all of whom presented with acute pain. The highlight of their finding is interesting:  In the end, race mattered but not in a way you might expect. In situations where the diagnosis was uncertain--low back pain, for instance--black patients received higher pain intensity ratings by the clinicians and were more likely to be prescribed opioid drugs.  In circumstances where ambiguity was low--such as wrist fracture--the reverse was true, and white patients were more likely to be prescribed opioids.

So in the end, race did play a factor...but ambiguity of diagnosis also was a contributing factor.  The authors caution that there are more factors at play than just these two things, and in fact the story is much more complex than it appears.  



You can read the abstract from the study by clicking here.


Original Post: 9/24/2014

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