Black patients less likely to receive certain pain relief post-surgery, new research suggests

(CNN) —& Although a combination of certain pain medications has been found to be more effective than opioids alone at managing discomfort after surgery, Black patients are less likely to receive this level of care while recovering from a major procedure, new research suggests.In a study presented Sunday at the& American Society of Anesthesiologists’ annual meeting& in Philadelphia, post-surgery Black patients were more likely to be prescribed oral opioids and less likely to receive multimodal analgesia, involving four modes of pain management, compared with their White peers.Multimodal analgesia is a method of pain management that uses multiple types of medications to reduce pain, and some experts argue that this approach not only can decrease the use of dangerously addictive opioids but& may be a more effective pain control strategy.“Multimodal analgesia means using medicines and techniques that act in different ways to reduce pain. By combining different modes patients get better pain relief and require less narcotics,” Dr. Nauder Faraday, an author of the study and professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in an email.For a patient to determine whether they will be receiving multimodal analgesia, they “could ask their physicians, before surgery starts, how their pain...