Slavery-era racial medical myths still bias modern physicians’ pain treatment

Evidence

Why would this be the case? For centuries, white physicians and scientists went to great lengths to prove that Black bodies were biologically and physiologically different from white bodies. To be clear, “different” almost always meant inferior. These physicians and scientists used their expertise and even empirical data to insist that enslaved Africans were “fit” for slavery and that the institution was not immoral or cruel, as many proclaimed. Over time, their theories became incorporated into and normalized in medical practice, and this racializing of medicine did not end after slavery. Two persistent physiological falsehoods—that Black people were impervious to pain and that they had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work—have wormed their way into the scientific consensus, and can still be seen in modern-day medical education and practice. A study of 222 white medical students and residents published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 showed that half of the students and residents endorsed at least one false idea about biological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than those of white people. When asked to imagine how much pain white or Black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents who held more false beliefs were more likely to maintain that Black people felt less pain, and thus they were less likely to recommend appropriate treatment. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 961

Categorization

• XREF: The 2016 PNAS study on medical students endorsing biological falsehoods connects to the reader’s broader interest in how structural racism persists through expert knowledge — parallel to the Milgrom/merchant chapter where institutions encode assumptions into ongoing practice. — connects to: Unconscious racial bias measurably degrades medical treatment for black patients. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1247
• SHARE: The 222-student PNAS study finding half endorsed a pain-insensitivity myth is a precise statistic worth sending to anyone in medical education or health-policy work.