" Dr. Knox Todd began documenting how patients’ race affects the treatment of pain when he was a doctor in the UCLA Emergency Center in the 1990s.46 He and colleagues examined the way doctors treated 139 white and Latino patients coming to the emergency room over a two-year period with a single injury—fractures of a long bone in either the arm or leg. Because this type of fracture is extremely painful, there is no medical reason to distinguish between the two groups of patients. Yet the researchers discovered that Latinos were twice as likely as whites to receive no pain medication while in the emergency room.47 Although it’s possible that the Latino patients complained less of pain, the doctors should have been aware of the high degree of pain they suffered, given the nature of their injuries. When Todd moved to Emory University School of Medicine, he led an Atlanta-based study that confirmed his finding in Los Angeles. This time his research team analyzed medical charts of 217 patients who were treated for long-bone fractures at an inner-city emergency room that served both black and white patients. In a 2000 article in Annals of Emergency Medicine, Todd reported that 43 percent of blacks, but only 26 percent of whites, received no pain medication. In this study, Todd took the additional step of documenting whether or not the patients expressed pain to their doctors. By carefully looking at notations in the medical files, he found that black patients were about as likely as whites to complain of pain. Black patients thus received pain medication half as often as whites because doctors did not order it for them, not because blacks do not feel pain or do not want pain relief. "

― Dorothy Roberts , Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century