White patients receive more pain treatment in emergency rooms than African-Americans and other minorities, a new study reports.
Researchers studied four years of data collected nationwide by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They used a sample of 6,710 visits to 350 emergency rooms by patients 18 and older with acute abdominal pain.
White and black patients reported severe pain with the same frequency — about 59 percent. But after controlling for age, insurance status, income, degree of pain and other variables, the researchers found that compared with non-Hispanic white people, non-Hispanic blacks and other minorities were 22 percent to 30 percent less likely to receive pain medication. Patients were also less likely to receive pain medicine if they were over 75 or male, lacked private insurance or were treated at a hospital with numerous minority patients. The study is in the journal Medical Care.
The senior author, Dr. Adil H. Haider, the director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said: “It may be that different people communicate differently with their providers. If we as providers could improve our ability to better communicate with patients so that we could provide more patient-centered care, we’ll be making several steps toward reducing and hopefully eliminating these disparities.”
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