Education to identify and combat racial bias in pain treatment.

Reducing racial bias in pain treatment is a laudable and feasible goal that requires attention to and management of health care professionals’ self-concept; an interdisciplinary approach to research that bridges knowledge and expertise across multiple fields; and a medical education system primed to take advantage of its unique position at the heart of health care professional formation and development. This paper provides support for a more complex understanding of the social and psychological factors driving racial bias in medicine and pain treatment, presents evidence that reducing racial biases is possible, and considers medical education’s role in doing so.