Racial discrimination in pain management

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The vulnerability of certain races and ethnicities may be worsened by the subjectiv-ity of pain. So, this study aimed at identifying whether there has been racial discrimination in pain control by health professionals. CONTENTS: This is a literature review and queried databases were: PubMed/Medline, LILACS, SciELO, Cochrane, EM-BASE, SCOPUS and psycINFO with keywords in English and Portuguese: pain-dor and race-raça or ethnic-etnia, analgesia-analgesia, prejudice/discrimination-discriminação, prescriptions drug-prescrição médica. From 3216 articles, 45 were selected. Five were included after manual search, in a total of 50 articles. CONCLUSION: No study was carried out in Brazil and 96% are from the United States. Studies are of the cross sectional and cohort type. Most researched races/ethnicities were black and white, followed by Hispanic and Asian. Most common outcomes were: access to treatment and analgesic prescription. Racial discrimination was identified in 74% of studies, being blacks the most discriminated race.