There are so many times that you see something or are told something and you say that CAN’T be real. But then you remember that we now live in Clown World and anything is possible. The new rule of thumb has to be if big Pharma says it, it probably is a lie
It isn’t a question of ethics. It is an issue with training.
When I went to medical school, we were told to watch out for black patients who were drug-seeking. Really, they should have excluded the race from the topic and focused on drug seekers.
While I was not taught this, it was believed that black people experienced less pain but were more likely to seek opioids. As such, that builds an unconscious bias towards black patients.
It is why I posted an article about unconscious bias and medical training.
It isn’t that pain is racist, it is we have bad stereotypes and myths that have infiltrated our medical system.
Back in school, if I were to prescribe an opioid (And this is back when I could hand them out like candy), nobody would double-check my work on a white patient. If it was a black patient, someone would always come to inspect the patient and often deny my recommendation.
Heart attacks were another bias that infiltrated the medical system.
Now, for Advil, this is just a marketing campaign, and it’s stupid, but as a critique of the medical system, it is valid.
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I dislike the term systemic racism because it is overused, but I think it fits this scenario perfectly. Most medical workers are not ‘racist,’ but racist stereotypes have infiltrated the thought process.
Are blacks more likely to seek drugs? It’s hard to say when you assume all black people are drug seeking. I have never seen a study that shows that but that idea is in the system.
I do ponder if that is why white people have such a high mortality rate with opioids. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306431#:~:text=The race%2Fethnicity distribution was 73%25 non-Hispanic White%2C 15%25,39.5 per 100 000 for 2018 and 2019%2C respectively.
I know the current restrictions are to lower the deaths, but I think they are stupid. I don’t want to hijack the conversation, but the current ideology only pushes people to the black market, where they end up dead.
This is one reason I support a single payer health system. We need to make sure we are not treating people with addictive drugs when we can actually fix their ailment. We also need to stop thinking addiction is a moral failing. Most people will become addicted to opioids if they are on them long enough, and even more so when we have much stronger opioids nowadays.
Alright off my soapbox.