By Rachel Rabkin Peachman, The New York Times, Aug. 16, 2022
Racial differences in medical care are part of a theme experts are seeing “over and over” again.
Judith McClellan, a social worker who lives in Salisbury, N.C., knows what it’s like to see her child in pain. Her daughter Kyarra, 15, has sickle cell disease, an inherited red blood cell disorder that most commonly affects Black people and frequently causes pain so excruciating that emergency opioids are necessary. When she was younger, Ms. McClellan said, Kyarra would describe the pain — caused by blockages in blood vessels — as feeling “like a butcher’s knife stabbing me 1,000 times in the same spot.”
During times of distress, Ms. McClellan said, “the protocol is we go to the nearest hospital” to receive powerful pain medications that will mitigate Kyarra’s discomfort until the crisis has passed. But because the McClellans, who are Black, live an hour and a half away from Kyarra’s primary hematologist, they often find themselves at emergency departments with medical staff who don’t know them and who often doubt Kyarra’s pain.
“If she says she has a pain level of eight — because she’s not screaming and hollering — they question, ‘Are you sure it’s an eight? Or are you making it an eight to get more pain medication?,’” Ms. McClellan said. “Sometimes I think they think she’s seeking drugs.”
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