From neonatal and primary care to emergency medicine, kids got lower-quality care than their white peers, researchers found. Disparities include longer waits and less pain medication after surgery.
From neonatal and primary care to emergency medicine, kids got lower-quality care than their white peers, researchers found. Disparities include longer waits and less pain medication after surgery.
I don’t think people would necessarily know that they’re experiencing discrimination. And people might not realize that they are treating folks unequally.
You can know you’re in pain and that the medication that you’ve been given isn’t eliminating all of the pain. But you don’t know why. Are you being given the maximum reasonable dose or is it because the doctor doesn’t believe you when you say you’re in pain? Or is it because the neighborhood you’re in (which is still influenced by decades of systemic racism) has had a history of more patients with drug seeking behavior? Maybe the ER in your neighborhood has longer wait times due to some unknown corporate policies or accounting that impacts staffing? How would you know? It’s not like you’re checking out all the ERs all the time and leaving Yelp reviews. Or maybe the person doing triage makes a split second judgment that you seem to be in less pain than someone else and are therefore lower priority?
All that said, I did actually have a racist dentist once. IDK if it had any real impact on the quality of my care (it’s not like I’m a dentist and can assess whether a filling should have been a crown or something).
How did I know? Well,ll I didn’t know at 1st. The receptionist was the dentist’s mother and she was super old. She would always be checking and double checking that I understood that I would be billed if the insurance didn’t pay and that I understood how much things could cost. And this wasn’t just once in a while, it was every damn time I came in. As a fairly well paid engineer with good insurance, this seemed really weird. My white husband had the same dentist and when I told him about this he was like “What? Dr X’s mom is just as sweet as pie.” She never asked him how he would pay for things even though he was on MY damn insurance! So we went on with me thinking the dentist’s mother was racist and my husband thinking that I was imagining things. And then one day, my husband was in the chair with a sports magazine from the waiting room. The cover had some large athlete, looking intimidating. It may have been someone who got physical with someone? I don’t remember, I’m not sporty. Anyway Dr. X says to my husband “Can you imagine having that gorilla coming at you”?. This was decades ago but my husband learned a valuable lesson that day.