Black Americans are Systematically Under-Treated for Pain. Why?

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• When it comes to the healthcare you receive, the color of your skin can make a significant difference,

• Racial disparities are particularly striking in pain treatment

• Black patients are significantly less likely to be prescribed pain medication

• white people believe Black people experience less pain

• In one study Trawalter and her collaborators designed, members of the NCAA Division I medical staff read a case concerning a student athlete with a torn ACL

• Participants were randomly assigned either a Black student or a white one, with everything else about the case remaining the same

• They then answered questions about the case (How painful was the injury, on a scale of 1-4?)

• participants generally assigned lower pain ratings to the Black students.

• there was no correlation between participants’ answers to the questions about their racial attitudes and the pain ratings they gave Black patients

• In other words, “even participants who have very positive racial attitudes show this bias,”

• If a person’s feelings about race don’t influence their perceptions of Black pain, what does?

• In another study

• this prediction on false claims made by physicians and scientists in the 1800s

• they’re actually not strongly related to racial prejudice, meaning that even people who report very positive racial attitudes still think that perhaps the Black body is fundamentally biologically different from the white body,” Trawalter said