Unfortunately, it is all too common for women to go to health care settings complaining of pain and have to deal with being ignored or dismissed by their health care providers. Due to the so-called pain gap, women are particularly undertreated compared to men. Several factors contribute to this gender pain gap, including differences between men and women, a lack of accurate training in how men and women express pain, cultural bias, and the classification of women as hysterical.
Why do doctors ignore women's pain?
Gaps in pain management care for women are well documented. Several studies suggest that there are clear gender differences when it comes to taking pain seriously in medicine. According to a 2022 study. American Heart Association Journal Women who visited the emergency room complaining of chest pain reported waiting 29% longer than men to get tested for a possible heart attack.another study Middle-aged women who complained of chest pain were twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness than men with the same symptoms. Women's negative attitudes toward pain have been shown to influence the treatment of a variety of health problems, including: stroke, reproductive health, chronic disease and physical painamong others.
Because women are more sensitive to pain than men and more likely to share that pain with their doctors, women's pain is often taken less seriously and portrayed as an overreaction, according to a study.Pain Research Interventions Director Roger Fillingim said.the center said washington post. Fillingum, co-author of a review paper on sex differences in pain, said there are several potential reasons, including hormones, genetics and social factors such as gender roles. Nevertheless, “we treat the pain that patients have, not the pain that we think they should have,” he told the Post.
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What is the cause of this phenomenon?
Anushey Hossain, author of The Pain Gap, acknowledged that a gap exists, but there is also a “confidence gap” that prevents women from getting the care they need when they are in pain. He told the Post that it was making it difficult. She says, “Women don't trust their bodies, and it's no surprise.'' Part of the reason for this gap is that women have historically been excluded from medical research. There is a possibility.of National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not require gender to be considered as a biological variable in most studies it funded until 2016. Health care providers are making progress, David Thomas, special adviser to the director of the NIH Women's Health Laboratory, told the Post. . “But we have a long way to go because systematic approaches to conducting research tend to focus on men, including painfully so.”
This issue may also be related to the lack of attention to the distinction between men and women in medical schools. Almost 95% of American medical school students said the curriculum should include instruction about sex differences and gender differences in medicine. According to a 2015 study. However, only 43% said the curriculum helped them understand these differences, and only 34.5% said they felt prepared to manage them in a medical setting. . “It's changing, but it's changing very slowly,” said Janice Welle, immediate past president of the American Women's Medical Association and chair of the leadership committee of the association's Sex and Gender Health Collaborative. Binsky told the Post.
Beyond the institutional and cultural issues that contribute to this gap, there may be personal reasons why physicians ignore patients with pain. Sarah Whetstone, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, says one reason doctors ignore their patients' pain is because they “internalize it as their own failure as a health care provider.” He told the New Yorker that it was a possibility. times. If a patient experiences more pain than the doctor would like, the doctor may feel that he or she is not doing a “good job as a health care provider.” Perhaps by ignoring the patient's complaints, the doctor was able to “emotionally distance himself from the inability to control the pain.”
