Without more information, it’s hard to know what to make of a study that shows Black kids are less likely to get pain meds in the ER than White kids.
From NBC News:
The researchers used national survey data from 2003 to 2010, covering more than 900,000 children with acute appendicitis. They thought studying appendicitis would be a good starting point since there’s broad agreement among experts that it’s a condition that merits pain relief.
Only 57 percent of the kids got anything for their pain in the emergency department, they found, and only 41 percent got an opioid drug. And just 12 percent of black children got an opioid drug for pain.
The researchers don’t know for sure why this is the case, but they suggest that it’s due to some “implicit assumptions and biases” on the part of doctors and nurses.
They don’t say what those biases are. But this underscores a survey from a few years ago that shows White people think African Americans feel less pain than they really do. A leading researcher on the topic had this to say in the NPR piece:
We have this assumption that because black people have been hardened by certain life experiences, that they can deal with more pain or they feel it less intensely, and therefore, they’re forced to endure even more. So this was a very surprising result that we have here that shows us how this sort of works in a cycle.
So it may not be racism. It might just be that White people don’t feel Blacks’ pain. Sad.