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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ironically, studies have also shown that physicians are more willing to prescribe pain medication to white patients.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/black-patients-bias-prescriptions-pain-management-medicine-opioids[/quote]

OK, let's go with that study...

From your article:

“A black patient with the same level of pain and everything else being accounted for was much less likely to receive an opioid prescription than a white patient with the same characteristics,” said study co-author Astha Singhal, an assistant professor at Boston University’s dental medicine school.

To determine whether there was a racial bias in pain medication prescriptions, the researchers looked at more than 60m records of pain-related emergency department visits from 2007 to 2011 for people aged 18 to 65.

Five conditions were examined and divided into two categories: definitive and non-definitive. The first referred to conditions that were easily diagnosed – kidney stones and long-bone fractures – and the second to conditions that are not: toothache, abdominal pain and back pain.

Black patients had about half the odds of being prescribed opioids compared to white patients for non-definitive conditions, according to the study, which Singhal co-authored with Renee Hsia of UC San Francisco and Yu-Yu Tien from the University of Iowa."

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So, what about all the other factors in white vs. black lives?  They are different, you know. Was that covered? Were these standard questionnaires on current health to all the survey participants?

"the researchers looked at more than 60m records of pain-related emergency department visits"   Great, so what was in the records? Were they standardized? Of course not.  What did they choose to count and how did they weigh the factors?  What were the pre-existing condtions?

Why should I put any merit in this study? It's a headline and when it comes to race, you love headlines. Meanwhile, did you dig into the study?

[/quote]

Funnily enough, I don't think YOU dug into the study.

The "headline" is attached to a newspaper article, which includes a link to the journal article. If you had clicked on that link and dug into the study yourself, you would know that the study was not based on questionnaires or interviews of patients, but rather was based on patient record forms completed by physicians. Physicians provide all the information--what the reason for the ER visit is, what services were provided in the ER, what meds were provided or subscribed. Clinicians also coded severity of pain.

There might be underlying differences in black and white patients, sure. The study controlled for some of these possible differences. It controlled for age and type of insurance, and how frequently the patient had been seen in the ER in the last year. But what this study found is that ER physicians--who know little else about a patient than what they've been able to glean during a 5 minute conversation--diagnose a black person and a white person of the same sex, age, type of insurance, and frequency visiting the ER with back pain and the same level of pain, but don't provide them with the same treatment. The white person is much more likely to get opioids administered in the ER and much more likely to get a prescription for opioids to take home with them.  But if the black person and white person are diagnosed with a leg fracture or kidney stone, they do get the same pain treatment. Why the difference? Well, fractures and kidney stones have clear clinical presentations--you can prove someone actually has a fracture or a kidney stone--but you can't prove back pain or abdominal pain. ER docs sometimes suspect that patients reporting back pain or abdominal pain are drug-seeking. And this study suggests they are more likely to suspect black people of drug seeking than white people--even though rates of opioid addiction are much higher in whites than in blacks.

This study is not perfect--it didn't control for every possible difference. But the fact that no racial differences were seen in certain types of conditions while they were significant for other types conditions suggests that race is the important factor here, not other, unmeasured differences.[/quote]

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