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A new study found that even when men and women express the same levels of physical pain, both male and female adults are more likely to consider women's pain to be less intense than men's, displaying a significant gender bias in pain estimation that could be causing disparities in health care treatment.
In a paper published in the Journal of Pain on March 5, researchers studied the impact of a patient's gender on pain perception and treatment recommendations from a sample of average adults. They found that both male and female "perceivers" in the sample showed a reasonably strong gender bias in their assumptions of the patients' pain, which were influenced by pain-related gender stereotypes.
Tor Wager, a neuroscience professor at Dartmouth College and co-author of the paper, told The Academic Times that it's natural for there to be bias in the estimation of someone else's physical pain, because pain is subjective and complex to express. Clinicians make judgments of their patients' pain every day, and those judgments are often biased, he said. Although natural, such biases contribute to health disparities and inequity in health care.
The authors cited previous studies that found that when it comes to physical pain, health care providers are more likely to recommend psychological treatment to women than to men, and more likely to recommend pain medication to men than to women. Research has also shown that women wait longer to receive pain medication and are less likely to receive opioids for pain relief.
"Women's pain is often discounted clinically. This study is a laboratory experiment to test whether people discount women's pain in a controlled setting," Wager said. "For that, you have to have a data set that is real clinical pain, and you have to know what the ground truth for that person is. You have to control for the actual pain and for a person's level of expressiveness, which we were able to do in this study."
In a paper published in the Journal of Pain on March 5, researchers studied the impact of a patient's gender on pain perception and treatment recommendations from a sample of average adults. They found that both male and female "perceivers" in the sample showed a reasonably strong gender bias in their assumptions of the patients' pain, which were influenced by pain-related gender stereotypes.
Tor Wager, a neuroscience professor at Dartmouth College and co-author of the paper, told The Academic Times that it's natural for there to be bias in the estimation of someone else's physical pain, because pain is subjective and complex to express. Clinicians make judgments of their patients' pain every day, and those judgments are often biased, he said. Although natural, such biases contribute to health disparities and inequity in health care.
The authors cited previous studies that found that when it comes to physical pain, health care providers are more likely to recommend psychological treatment to women than to men, and more likely to recommend pain medication to men than to women. Research has also shown that women wait longer to receive pain medication and are less likely to receive opioids for pain relief.
"Women's pain is often discounted clinically. This study is a laboratory experiment to test whether people discount women's pain in a controlled setting," Wager said. "For that, you have to have a data set that is real clinical pain, and you have to know what the ground truth for that person is. You have to control for the actual pain and for a person's level of expressiveness, which we were able to do in this study."
Womens' pain not taken as seriously as mens' pain
Researchers found that when male and female patients expressed the same amount of pain, observers viewed female patients' pain as less intense and more likely to benefit from psychotherapy versus medication as compared to men's pain, exposing a significant patient gender bias that could lead to...
www.sciencedaily.com
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