Opioid use stigma may underlie clinician biases towards patients with sickle cell disease

In season 1, episode 2 of the popular show The Pitt, a Black woman with sickle cell disease arrives at the emergency department in acute pain, only to be initially dismissed as drug-seeking.

“Unfortunately, this contemporary media portrayal is all too relevant,” said Austin Wesevich, MD, MPH, MS, a hematologist and health services researcher at the University of Chicago Medicine. “Nationwide, patients with sickle cell disease are not receiving the same quality of care that other patients experience.”

New research led by Wesevich and colleagues at UChicago Medicine unpacks the intersectional biases that may underlie this disparity in care quality. Published in JAMA Network Open, the study looked for associations between the presence of negative descriptors in clinician notes and the overlapping stigmatized factors of race, chronic pain, and opioid treatment among patients with sickle cell disease — most of whom are Black.