In a recent article, Dr. Egede argues that "there is evidence that racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower quality of care than nonminorities".
The first area in which ethnocentrism affects medication management is linguistic. Patients who are not fluent in English may have some difficulty in understanding oral directions given by doctors, nurses, or pharmacists, and also might have difficulty reading materials accompanying medications and thus miss crucial instructions such as whether to take medications with or without food or details of drug interactions. Health care providers may also have difficulty understanding patients' symptoms or lifestyle issues, which can impede proper diagnosis. Thus, ethnocentrism on the part of health care providers may result in incorrect prescriptions or limited compliance with a medication regimen.
A second issue is that patients from different cultures perceive and report pain differently. While certain cultures may have an ingrained bias towards under-reporting pain, others may tend to exaggerate pain. This means that health care providers should be extremely careful in taking patient histories to understand the cultural components of pain and disability claims made by patients. Ethnocentrism can cause health care providers to take a generic approach when a more tailored one is more effective.
Finally, researchers are investigating the possibility that there may be genetic components to the way people experience pain and various chronic conditions and react to medications. This suggests that an ethnocentric one-size-fits-all approach to medication for various conditions is less effective than one with some components tailored to specific ethnic groups.
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