Black Women Receive Lower Doses of Postpartum Pain Medication, According to New Study

Parenting/ Health

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Inequities in pain medication treatment received postpartum, after giving birth, were found in a Cedars-Sinai study of 18,000 women. The disparities were observed even among patients reporting the highest pain levels. The retrospective cohort study was published in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. Both opioid and non-opioid pain medications given to patients were examined. Investigators wanted to see if the lower opioid doses reported in some studies finding racial and ethnic differences in peripartum pain management could be due to those patients receiving other kinds of drugs for their discomfort. “Even after adjusting our analysis to include non-opioid medications, Black and Hispanic patients who reported the highest pain scores received lower doses of opioid-containing medication. The fact that they also received non-opioid drugs could not explain the lower opioid treatment they received when compared with white patients,” said Naomi Greene, PhD, principal investigator of the study and research assistant professor of  Obstetrics and Gynecology. Pain associated with labor and delivery can make it challenging for women to care for themselves and their newborns. Investigators looked at many variables available in the electronic medical records of the patients who delivered at Cedars-Sinai over a three-year period, 2019−2021....

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