Women in Pain: Problems and Mistreatment

Chronic pain in North America is a major problem for men and women alike, affecting about one-third of adults. Many people of both genders do not receive adequate treatment for their pain. This causes great personal suffering, as well as high costs to the economy through direct health care costs and loss of work productivity for those in pain. However, women with pain face additional problems that suggests there is a systematic bias in the way healthcare is delivered to women. Diseases that affect mostly women are generally poorly understood and understudied, and although women report pain that is more frequent, more severe, and of longer duration than men, in general women’s pain is treated much less aggressively.

Women are at higher risk of developing a chronic pain condition than men. For example, women have triple the risk of autoimmune diseases, which are often associated with chronic pain, compared to men. Women also suffer from certain painful diseases that are rare in men, such as endometriosis and vulvodynia. Endometriosis alone affects one in ten women, and women who have endometriosis often have other painful diseases as well, such as interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome.

However, research into causes and treatments for these diseases that disproportionately affect women is sadly lacking. A report written by the Campaign to End Chronic Pain in Women looked at six conditions common in women that are routinely misdiagnosed and ineffectively treated: endometriosis, vulvodynia, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome, and temporomandibular (TMJ) disorders. Examining funding to these six conditions by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed that on average, the NIH spends $1.33 per affected patient on research into these conditions, compared to $186 per patient for Parkinsons’s disease, or $53 per patient for diabetes.

However, one need not look at diseases that are underfunded, poorly understood, and lacking effective treatments to find evidence of a gender bias in medicine. One of the best examples of gender bias is, surprisingly, in coronary heart disease. When presenting to emergency rooms or hospitalized for a heart attack, multiple studies have shown that men receive faster access to diagnostic tests and treatments, and men are more likely to receive advanced procedures and better care (for example,see here, here, here and here), and these disparities have not changed over time.

Although heart disease can present differently in men and women, atypical presentation in women does not account for all of the difference in delayed or lack of access to tests and treatments. In one study of doctors evaluating hypothetical patients— male patients and female patients presenting with typical heart attack symptoms and identical risk factors– the doctors did not make different recommendations for the male and female patients. However, when stress was included as a risk factor, only 15 percent of doctors diagnosed heart disease in the women, compared to 56 percent for the men. This study suggests that doctors are much more likely to write symptoms off as psychological when the patient is a woman. And women are medicated as if their pain is emotional instead of physical: for example, after coronary artery bypass graft surgery, women are less likely than men to receive opioid pain medication, and more likely to receive sedatives instead.

Many studies have shown that female gender is a major risk factor for the undertreatment of pain, across many different types of pain. After abdominal surgery and appendectomies, women receive less pain medication than men, even though many studies have shown that women are more likely to report higher levels of pain than men. For cancer pain, and pain caused by HIV, women are significantly more likely to be undertreated for pain. Even paramedics are more likely to give opioid analgesics to men suffering from pain pre-hospital admission than to women. In general, doctors and other medical professionals are more likely to view women’s pain as caused by emotional factors even in the presence of positive test results, and are more likely to administer tranquilizers, antidepressants, and non-opioid analgesics to treat women’s pain.

Women face obstacles to getting appropriate care for many different diseases, at every step of the process. Women’s diseases tend to be underfunded, underresearched, and poorly understood, so getting a diagnosis is difficult, especially when there is the additional obstacle of health care providers tending to assume that women’s symptoms are psychosomatic. Once diagnosed, women do not receive the same level of care for their diseases that men do. And if women can be shortchanged on care for cardiac conditions, which tend to be taken seriously in our society, well researched, and have evidence-based guidelines to guide treatment, imagine how poorly women may be treated for diseases like endometriosis, for which myths about causes and effective treatment abound, and their pain cannot be measured with any objective tests.

Until medical care for women’s diseases moves from the 1950s into the present day, the only solution for women is to be extremely persistent. Women need to seek out the few care providers who understand their disease and are up to date on the latest, albeit sparse, research, and they need to be persistent about having their symptoms acknowledged and treated by their care providers. And in general, we need to keep pushing for better awareness of these problems, and funding for research so that women can receive the medical care they deserve.