How women’s pain is being ignored by healthcare professionals

It seems women are paying a health cost for being, well, women.

A study has found that female patients are less likely to receive pain medication than male patients who reported the same level of distress.

It’s just one more piece in the growing concern over the ‘gender pain gap’, an issue of how pain in women is more poorly treated and misdiagnosed than in men.

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that because of sex bias, women often received different care from men.

Dire consequences

The study stated that it found “robust evidence” physicians’ and nurses’ pain management decisions in emergency departments favoured female patients less when compared to male patients.

“We think the consequences are dire. Pain management is one of the most important medical interventions,” Dr Tom Gordon-Hecker, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and one of the study’s authors, told Euronews Health. 

“Poor pain management predicts mental problems, development of chronic pain and return visits to the ED. Our results suggest that women are at higher risk for these negative outcomes, due to inadequate pain treatment.”

The study examined discharge records for more than 17,000 emergency room patients at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Israel from 2015 to 2019. To ensure it wasn’t a cultural issue, the team also analysed 4000 discharge records for the University of Missouri Health Care in the US.

Bias in all cases

The researchers recorded the gender of the patient and the treating doctor and nurses, the level of pain reported by the patients and the pain medication prescribed upon discharge.

They found bias against women in all cases, across age groups and reported levels of pain.

The authors found the results were “amazingly consistent”.

They also found that nurses are 10 per cent less likely to record female patients’ pain scores, and women spend an additional 30 minutes in the emergency department compared to their male counterparts.

“The literature suggests that women tend to experience greater pain for the same injury or complaint,” Dr Gordon-Hecker said.

“If this is indeed the case, then we should expect women to receive more – and not fewer – analgesics. However, our findings show the opposite,” he added, underlining that the bias “might even be greater than the one observed” in the study.

Same symptoms, different assessment

The researchers also set up an experiment, asking nurses to assess a hypothetical scenario where the same symptoms were presented for men and women. The nurses were asked to rate the pain levels out of 100 on their own diagnosis. 

For male patients, nurses rated his pain closer to 90, averaging 80. When the patient was described as a woman, nurses rated her pain lower, averaging 72. 

In both the experiment and the data studies, disparities persisted regardless of the healthcare provider’s sex.

While the authors suggested more work needed to be done in the area, they recommended one simple step may be to add a prompt or ‘pop-up’ when healthcare workers were entering pain scores provided by patients. 

Is that enough? Sadly, the research backs decades of studies. As far back as 1989 it was found women were half as likely as men to receive painkillers after surgery.  

It was found that if women complained of being in pain it was seen as “nagging or whining”. Women were also more likely to be prescribed sedatives than painkillers. None of the men in the study were prescribed sedatives.  

Do you think the gender pain gap is real? Why not share your opinion in the comments section below?

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