The opioid (painkiller) epidemic, with its seemingly indiscriminate reach, has embraced an alarming number of Americans. In the most recent statistics available, two million Americans either abuse or are dependent on prescription opioids. Even the death of internationally acclaimed artist, Prince Rogers Nelson, has now been attributed to fentanyl overdose, a strong prescription opioid whose illicit version has become a popular and problematic street drug.
Still, America’s spotlight on the opioid crisis largely overlooks a seemingly less appreciable problem and two sides of the same coin. Racial bias when prescribing pain medication is contributing to suffering in blacks and a disproportionate rate of deaths in whites. This may be the first time in modern medicine where we so clearly see provider bias on the same issue as a detriment to both races. While each is wholly unacceptable, the inherent hypocrisy underlying the recent attention to an epidemic that adversely and disproportionately affects whites is revealing.
Modern medicine repeatedly shows us traces of inadequate and unequal care for blacks — vestiges born from the ideologies of slavery. They serve as uncomfortable reminders of racist practices like lack of pain medicine for blacks during unwanted and unethical surgical experimentation. Just last year, research in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, showed that of the almost 1 million children diagnosed with appendicitis, black children who reported moderate pain were less likely than white children to receive pain medicine. Similarly, those reporting severe pain were less likely to receive opioids compared to white children. Like others before them, Dr. Monika Goyal and her colleagues suggest that there is a different threshold to treat pain in black versus white patients.
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