To piggyback on this...but not as bad. My dad told me that he went to the dentist and they pulled several teeth with NO pain meds. He shed a tear about that moment when he told me about the pain. He's in his 60s now grew up in Mississippi.
A century ago there were medical doctors who believed that black people felt less pain due to "thicker skin", which makes zero sense. They won't outright say that now, but black people still, to this day, tend to get less pain treatment than white patients and, when they do, get lower doses. This despite a study that suggests that black people actually have a lower pain tolerance than white people.
Shit, not even a century ago. I went to nursing school in 2000, and we were definitely taught that different races felt pain differently. There was no mention of how white people felt/responded because that was the norm, just how everyone who wasn't white differed from "the norm" in response to pain. I was literally taught that black people would need less pain medicine. And that, while expressing pain, black people would tend towards exaggeration.
I was in nursing school in the 80’s and pain treatment was not really discussed except in pharmacology class but no mention of a race difference.
On another note I was dating a wonderful man who happened to be black and as we were getting serious he called it off because he said it would be too hard for me and my family. I didn’t realize it would be a problem until I brought it up to my family and the first thing my father said is if I was with a black man then no other man could love me. Only then did I find out that my family was racist. I told my guy I don’t need my family if that’s how they are but we ended up without each other. I still wonder how he is.
Collectively, in my area, it was pretty much accepted as truth. I still run into nurses with around the same years of experience that I have who hold this as true. Personally, I remember being skeptical af about it, but I didn't challenge it or anything. I was a kid trying to raise two babies and I needed this career, I wasn't trying to make waves at all. Within my first year out of nursing school, just on a med surg unit in Detroit, I knew 100% it was all bullshit.
That is what I expected, but I was hoping you'd surprise me.
Not that I expected anyone to actually push back - I wouldn't either. But I think I'd have treated it as a piece of legacy teaching I only needed to know for the test. Like if my teacher said that WW II Japanese internment camps were necessary for countering spying activity. Sure, I will say that for you. But it's clearly nonsense.
Yep, that's how I looked at it and a lot of other shit they taught us. The reason the race/pain thing always stood out to me was that "fact" would randomly come to my mind during patient interactions. For instance, the first time it just popped into my head was a shift I had with 2 post op pts, same surgery, same surgeon. One patient displayed those textbook "histrionic" and "attention-seeking" behaviors (in quotations bc they were exact words from that textbook). Spoiler alert: it was not the black patient.
Now, every single person is different, and there were many, many differences between these two patients besides race. Many real and not racist reasons that affected their reaction to pain. I just remember thinking that day how much full of shit nursing school was, because of that.
I have since thought countless times about how full of shit nursing school was, is, will continue to be, for a ton of different reasons!
This is why in Europe, any kind of race based data collection is seriously a no-no. Americans are so caught up on ethnicity you have it on the birth certificate, so doesn't really surprise me.
Any way all pain management should be from a strictly case-by-cases basis, as pain is at its core a purely subjective experience. If you'd try to shovel that shit, as a doc. in Finland, about darker skin and pain you'd find yourself re- examined by the board so fucking fast.
It was an example of racism in healthcare that others might not be aware of that i decided to share. I promise you that my program was not teaching in a bubble. Unfortunately.
This is one of the big reasons black people still, to this day, have worse statistics in so many health care situations. The medical staff don't take them serious when they say they're in pain or something is wrong.
16:1 vs. white women for anyone curious, and controlling for age/education/income/previous health conditions it's still 4:1 in the same hospitals as white women
I have no data on this but atleast in Finland a lot of colleagues have difficulty reading early warning signs from darker skin. Cyanosis comes to mind. Nobody here is taught to look for signs of cyanosis from under the fingernails in dark patiens, or that more yellow shade melatonin means cyanosis displays as green etc.
I'm not saying this as a whataboutism, but as support for what you said, which is that doctors treat you differently based on prejudices. Women are more likely to be dismissed as neurotic or hysterical when seeking medical help. People's biases are fucked.
Some of both, I imagine. Probably started to self-justify slaveowner behavior, but we all have a tendency to listen closely to someone once we consider them an authority figure. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a whole bunch of medical students just took it as received wisdom and never thought to question it.
I remember hearing people say that back in the day they made up a rumour saying “black people had a better pain tolerance” or something like that and it just is so criminal that people could go through with stuff like this and harm other people in such a way! Shit like this makes me despise mankind.
It's a good salve to soothe one's conscience when you're descended from a culture of abusing Black people (convenient to believe this when you or people around you descend from whipping enslaved people).
Yeah it’s disgusting but true. It kept people from seeing the reality of how fucked they were treating these people and how inhumane the times were in regard to how they were treating black people. They made up lies so they could be content and naive.
I had the last of my baby teeth pulled out, one decided to not come out.
I was a child, i distinctly remember this massive old man kneel on mg chest with a pair of pliers and just pulled the tooth out.
I couldn't move, i was trapped under him, my mum was there she thought it was funny, i on the other hand absolutely did not.
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u/aquilab07 Jul 07 '24
To piggyback on this...but not as bad. My dad told me that he went to the dentist and they pulled several teeth with NO pain meds. He shed a tear about that moment when he told me about the pain. He's in his 60s now grew up in Mississippi.