title:  Racism Accidentally Prevents Pain Killer Addiction From Hurting Black Communities
text: This has to be the most counter-intuitive and ironic result of racism conceivable. The implicit racism of medical professionals is directly preventing the black community from suffering the same epidemic of opioid addiction and overdoses that is devastating white communities all over America.The reason?Doctors and nurses think black people are super humans (Yes, for real!):Researchers at the University of Virginia quizzed white medical students and residents to see how many believed inaccurate and at times  fantastical  differences about the two races   for example, that blacks have less sensitive nerve endings than whites or that black people s blood coagulates more quickly. They found that fully half thought at least one of the false statements presented was possibly, probably or definitely true.Moreover, those who held false beliefs often rated black patients  pain as lower than that of white patients and made less appropriate recommendations about how they should be treated.If this sounds insane to you, remember that the police regularly pump unarmed black men full of bullets because they literally believe that black people are inhumanly strong and resistant to pain. The phrases  demonic,   inhuman  and  like a wild animal  have been used repeatedly to describe black people. This is a direct result of centuries of racist fearmongering about  aggressive  blacks so it s not at all surprising to find that the medical community has fallen victim to this pervasive implicit (and sometimes overtly explicit) racism.But it IS a little surprising (OK, VERY surprising and even more disturbing) that you can get a license to practice medicine without having learned that there are no significant biological differences between blacks and whites. What the hell are medical schools teaching that leaves their students this painfully ignorant?As mentioned above, they literally think black people don t experience pain the same way. The result? They don t give black people nearly as much pain medication:A 2000 study out of Emory University found that at a hospital emergency department in Atlanta, 74 percent of white patients with bone fractures received painkillers compared with 50 percent of black patients. Similarly, a paper last year found that black children with appendicitis were less likely to receive pain medication than their white counterparts.If you ll recall, the over-prescription of painkillers to white people is the direct cause of the drug epidemic assaulting white communities. White people have been getting hooked on pain killers and when their doctors finally cut them off (if they ever do), they turn to the next closest thing: Heroin. And it spirals out of control from there.By being racist jerks that allow black people to suffer pain in the short term, the medical community has spared them the long term pain of addiction. At last, systemic racism finally did something positive for the black community. Hooray. Aren t you just so proud of AmeriKKKa now?Featured image via vine18.com