Are medical students biased toward chronic pain patients?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65539/w1fgz146Keywords:
medical student bias, chronic pain, opioid epidemic, patient perception, medical educationAbstract
Background: Little research has been done into exploring medical students' perspectives of chronic pain patients despite increasing media attention on the opioid epidemic and their encounters during medical school. Methods: To investigate, all medical students at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine were emailed an invitation to voluntarily participate in an online survey. Students were randomized between two identical patient vignettes, one was the control and the other was identical with the exception of a history of chronic back pain and opioid dependence. Students were then asked a series of questions regarding their perceptions, biases, and attitudes towards the patient in their vignette. Eleven questions were asked using a 0-10 scale. Results: Results between the control and pain patient were quantified using an unpaired t-test. Students rated the chronic pain patient worse than the control in 8 of the 11 questions. Discussion: Our survey showed that medical students had more negative perceptions of chronic pain patients in terms of their health, self-care, self-discipline, and compliance.
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Copyright (c) 2020 Genevieve Pourzan, Alberto Tamayo, Muhammad Nabeel (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
