CHICAGO - Black and Hispanic patients in acute pain are likely to receive less potent pain killers when they visit emergency departments in hospitals as compared to their white counterparts, a large US study has revealed.
Lead researcher Mark J. Pletcher of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues reviewed the treatment prescribed in 375,000 emergency room visits between 1993 and 2005 in US hospitals. More specifically, the researchers wanted to ascertain if opioid use in dealing with acute pain was increasing or decreasing.
Opioid drugs are powerful narcotic painkillers that are known to relieve acute pain caused by traumatic injuries. While the researchers found that use of these painkillers had generally improved in hospitals nationwide, they were surprised to find a racial/ethnic divide in opioid prescription.
Around 156,729 of 374,891 visits to emergency departments were related to pain. Among these 29 percent of the patients were prescribed an opioid analgesic. However 31 percent of whites who visited emergency departments for pain were prescribed an opioid analgesic as compared to 23 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Hispanics.
"Studies in the 1990s showed a disturbing racial or ethnic disparity in the use of these potent pain relievers, but we had hoped that the recent national efforts at improving pain management in emergency departments would shrink this disparity," Dr Pletcher admitted. "Unfortunately, this is not the case."
The report said that most physicians and nurses assume that patients of ethnic background exaggerate their symptoms to obtain powerful drugs to either sell or abuse them. "We think our data indicate that opioids are being underprescribed to minority emergency department patients, especially black and Hispanic patients," Pletcher said.
The authors called for increasing pain management awareness among physicians as well as nurses. Cultural awareness must be promoted and patients must be educated to advocate their own pain control, the authors concluded.
The details of the study appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
