Do doctors treat pain differently based on their patients ’ race?

Physicians prescribed opioids more often to their white patients who complained of new-onset low back pain than to their Black, Asian and Hispanic patients during the early days of the national opioid crisis, when prescriptions for these powerful painkillers were surging but their dangers were not fully apparent,according to a UCLA study.The findings suggest that doctors may have commonly dispensed pain treatments unequally based on race and ethnicity. The study shows that physicians were more likely to prescribe non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs — a less-powerful alternative — to their patients of color who came to them for back pain care.“This appears to be a case of differential treatment of pain or bias by physicians, in which the pain of certain patients deserves opioids and the pain of others does not,” said Dr. Dan Ly, the study’s author and an assistant professor of medicine at theDavid Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.“The fact that, in hindsight, more white patients developed dangerous long-term opioid use doesn’t absolve physicians of this differential treatment.”The paper is published today in the peer-reviewed JAMA Health Forum.Ly examined nationwide medical claims data from 2006 through 2015 for about 275,000 Medicare beneficiaries who were 66 or older and were experiencing new-onset low back pain. Approximately 81% of these patients were white, 6% were Black, 6% were Asian/Pacific Islander and 8% were Hispanic.Focusing on how ind...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news