Although great strides have been made over the past few decades in making medicine more equitable, there are still many racial inequalities that exist in the field. One of the biggest challenges that patients face is the racial bias physicians hold in treating pain. Specifically, studies show that physicians tend to believe that African Americans experience less pain than white people. Many medical students hold misconceptions that African Americans have less sensitive nerve endings and have blood that coagulates faster. When gone uncorrected, they have a significant impact on the quality of treatment patients receive.
However, these biological differences are completely untrue and instead stem from reduced diversity. We, as humans, are naturally more empathetic towards those who look like us, and this translates to feeling more for those who are of the same race as us. This bias, however, can be reduced by increasing physicians’ exposure to treating people from a wide variety of ethnicities.
Our country’s history of racism also plays a large role in these misconceptions, as white slave owners often justified their violent treatment of slaves by claiming that they felt less pain than other ethnicities. Additionally, the United States has tested diseases and chemical weapons on African Americans in the 1800s and 1900s with the explanation that African Americans were more resistant to pain and injury.
What’s important to understand is that physicians do not have to be outright “racist” in order for them to hold these biases. Instead, these biases are a result of many social and cultural factors and are often implicit, meaning they go unnoticed by the physicians themselves. So, even if physicians believe that they see and treat all patients equally, these implicit biases still influence factors such as the pain medication they prescribe and how much they believe their patients’ descriptions of pain.
The creation of new artificial intelligence technology that assists physicians in treating patients will help provide more objective assessments of pain. Current machine learning algorithms do still encode certain racial biases but do not contain as much of the inevitable, flawed prejudices to the extent that we hold as humans.
Many medical schools have implicit bias training, and these programs have shown to be effective in creating a more equitable atmosphere for a diverse patient population. One of the most effective methods in reducing bias is to have physicians interact with coworkers of different races who are of equal position to them in the workplace. This method, known as equal-status contact, is known to increase empathy and reduce stereotyping. Overall, there is still a lot of work to be done to make healthcare more equitable for those of minority populations, but placing a greater emphasis on such techniques will guide the medical community on the right path.