According to a recent international study, the pain that women can experience is generally underestimated compared to that of men. However, this same pain is equal from a clinical point of view. These gender biases unfavorable to women are mainly involved in the allocation of treatments.
Women and men have the same propensity to feel pain. Nevertheless, a study published in The Journal of Pain on March 5, 2021 evokes gender bias regarding the estimation of pain in medicine. This work includes two distinct experiments were conducted by an international group of psychology researchers from China, the United States and France.
The first experiment included about fifty participants, namely thirty women and twenty men not belonging to the medical world. The researchers showed them videos of patients of both genders with shoulder pain that was roughly similar in intensity. The volunteers had to rate the pain of the patients on a scale of 0 to 100. However, the participants systematically attributed a higher score to the men . In short, women's pain has been underestimated.
The second experiment involved a larger sample, namely 197 participants (81 women and 116 men). Not only was it a question of assessing the pain of female and male patients, but also of putting oneself in the shoes of doctors deciding on the choice of treatment. The volunteers also had to fill out a document containing ten questions. The goal ? Be aware of possible gender stereotypes or biases present in the participants.
This second experiment led to the same conclusion as the first. Indeed, with equal pain and the same degree of expression, the pain of women has again been underestimated. Researchers have also identified a recurring stereotype, namely that women would express their pain more than men.
"The more participants believed that women were more willing to report pain than men, the less they perceived patients' pain" , can we read in the study.
Psychologists have also discussed treatment allocation. Participants prescribed more psychotherapies women rather than men instead of drugs. However, the patients in question did not need psychotherapeutic treatment any more than the men. The fact is that the profiles were very similar in terms of psychology and general health. Again, it was about how women expressed their pain. For the researchers, these gender biases can have an impact on the estimation of pain and thus, on the choice of the treatment intended to remedy it.
