TY - JOUR T1 - Racism and casteism: global chasms of access to palliative care and pain relief JF - BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care JO - BMJ Support Palliat Care SP - 57 LP - 60 DO - 10.1136/spcare-2022-003717 VL - 13 IS - 1 AU - William E Rosa AU - M R Rajagopal AU - Afsan Bhadelia AU - Katie Fitzgerald Jones AU - Judy Khanyola AU - Felicia Marie Knaul AU - Joan Marston AU - Dingle Spence Y1 - 2023/03/01 UR - http://spcare.bmj.com/content/13/1/57.abstract N2 - Minoritised racial, cultural and ethnic groups experience substandard palliative care (PC) and pain-related outcomes across all settings in absolute and relative terms.1–4 The suffering of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) has been and continues to be frequently silenced through fear, intimidation, abuse, experimentation and eugenics, all of which have then been used to rationalise lack of access, shrouding both deliberate marginalisation and indifference in an argument around a lack of need for palliative care and pain relief (PCPR) based on prejudice rather than evidence.5 As a result, BIPOC are consistently subjugated to grave disparities of suffering through scientific racism and the clinical minimisation and distortion of their experiences, including appalling claims that they experience less pain than their White counterparts—or no pain at all—for the same ailments and injuries.6 Though racism is being discussed with increasing frequency, casteism is a critical factor and is defined as, ‘(a)ny action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, (or) seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category.’7 If racism is the house that shelters the privileged and excludes the marginalised, casteism is the foundation that sustains inequity from the bottom up.Modern iterations of racism and casteism in PC settings are described in several ways and are largely resultant of structural inequities that prevent fully integrated, accessible, and tailored PC provision for many BIPOC. For instance, Black individuals at the end of life are more likely to die in acute care settings rather than at home, more frequently elect “aggressive”8 and potentially harmful disease-modifying interventions at end of life, have lower rates of hospice use before death, and are less likely to … ER -