Conference Participants Discuss Ways To Improve Pain Treatment for Minorities

About 50 health providers discussed racial disparities in end-of-life care at a May 4 conference in New Jersey titled "Palliative Care for the Medically Underserved," the Bergen Record reports. Dr. Stacie Pinderhughes, a Mount Sinai School of Medicine assistant professor, said that although all Americans receive "too little pain relief," minorities in particular are less likely to receive such treatment. For instance, African Americans make up just 8% of participants in hospice care, while 83% of hospice patients are white. In addition, a recent study showed that whites with serious bone fractures were twice as likely as their Hispanic counterparts to receive pain medication; blacks were 66% more likely than whites not to receive such treatment. According to Richard Payne, chief of pain and palliative care at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, disparities in end-of-life care "mirror" those in other facets of health care, leading minorities to distrust the health care system as a whole. That distrust "reaches a peak with serious or terminal illnesses, 'where people are their most vulnerable and where the stakes are the highest,'" he added. Payne and Pinderhughes called upon medical schools to improve their training for palliative care and doctors to consider how "unconscious racial stereotypes" play into pain treatment decisions (Davis, Bergen Record, 5/5).