Health | Broad comparison: Women’s pain is underestimated in healthcare

General according to the concept, doctors treat women’s reports of their pain differently than men’s. So are nurses. Now, an extensive comparison has been made in the United States and Israel that supports the claim.

In Israel and the United States, for example, women who got home from the emergency room are much less likely to receive a prescription for painkillers than men.

This happens even if a man and a woman have exactly the same problem.

The data set of one study included more than 17,000 patients. 47 percent of men received a painkiller prescription, 38 percent of women.

Distinctive the phenomenon occurred in all age groups and in all ailments. The gender of the prescribing physician did not affect the differentiation.

Men and women therefore behave in the same way as doctors.

“The phenomenon can affect women’s health,” write the psychologists Mika Guzikevits from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tom Gordon-Hecker from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Their research was published In Pnas Journal of the American Academy of Sciences.

Guzikevits and Gordon-Hecker and their groups wanted to study real treatments. So they examined anonymized patient records in hospitals in the United States and Israel.

Psychologists compared the treatments received by a total of 21,851 patients. Patients had come to hospitals because of pain.

The patient’s age and sex, the reported level of pain and what the patient was suffering from were mentioned in the patient information. Also included was information on how often the patient had visited the emergency room and what medications the patient was prescribed.

According to the researchers, the comparison revealed a gender-related bias in how seriously women’s complaints are taken. Female patients were prescribed less pain medication compared to men. The gender difference was consistent.

Treatment differences could not be linked to any other variable. Only the gender of the patient made the difference, write the researchers.

In another section of the study, the same researchers presented a patient with severe back pain to 109 nurses.

Only the gender of the patient was changed. Other factors remained the same.

When the patient was a woman, the participants rated the intensity of the pain lower on average. The amount of women’s pain was estimated at 72/100 on a scale of one hundred. If the patient was male, the pain was rated worse, on average 80/100.

Several studies have previously shownthat doctors consider women less reliable than men when reporting their pain. The same phenomenon has been observed in surveys and virtual patients. Women also have to wait longer for treatment in the emergency room than men.

There are also studies in which no differences were found in the attitude of healthcare personnel towards men and women, write Guzikevits and Gordon-Hecker.

Then patients had a clearly visible source of pain, such as a broken bone. Differences arise much more clearly when the pain is not as palpable, such as a stomach ache or a headache.

of the United States in the journal of the Academy of Sciences also reported on the published study website Science Alert and Eurekalert.