Women Have More Pain Than Men

Pain treatment in women may be less likely to succeed because they experience pain differently than men. Some say doctors are quicker to dismiss their complaints.

It’s been clear for a decade that pain is often treated incorrectly. For example, the opioid epidemic was fueled by pharmaceutical marketing to doctors who didn’t know that opioids would make chronic pain worse.

Research has lagged behind, leaving doctors with little to go on but their instincts based on your subjective report of pain. As a result, cases of delayed, missed, and incorrect diagnoses are common, in the range of 10 to 20 percent, a 2012 study found.

Nine years later, an international team reported that many medical practitioners still didn’t understand that sleep problems and psychological distress aggravate chronic pain.

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In the latest U.S. government survey, nearly 22 percent of adult women reported experiencing pain either every day or most days during the past three months, compared to 19 percent of men. Pain was also more likely to have a big impact on women’s lives.

For both men and women, among poor Americans especially, the prevalence of chronic pain has been increasing, other research has concluded.

Several carefully controlled experiments have examined sex differences in human pain perception, suggesting that women may have a lower threshold for pain or have less tolerance for intense stimuli, but it is not clear exactly why. No clear anatomical differences have been established.

Women are more likely to have migraines, back pain (after menopause), rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, and jaw and bladder pain.

In addition to experiencing both chronic and acute pain more often, women report greater pain intensity than men with the same pain condition, and more acute post-operative pain than men undergoing the same procedures.

“These differences reflect a combination of genetic, biological/hormonal, psychological, social, and cultural factors that span different age groups, racial/ethnic categories, medical conditions, and socioeconomic classes, making the gender gap in pain patients a complex and widespread problem,” writes Tina Doshi, MD, a chronic pain specialist and researcher and assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

The American medical community has acknowledged the need for better pain control, as doctors learn not to rely on opioids for chronic pain patients. But no pain medications have been developed specifically for women.

Doctors are unhappy about the situation. More than 60 percent of pain medicine physicians in the United States reported high emotional exhaustion in one survey.

You will need to be your own advocate and speak up about your pain.

Patients need to be willing to speak to their doctors in plain, even blunt, language.

Women, in particular, need to be comfortable expressing concerns over diagnosis and treatment they believe is based on their gender. Doctors need to be good listeners and be willing to allow the time each patient needs.  

Never be the passive recipient of any diagnosis or treatment for pain or any other conditions. You are a partner in your health maintenance. Arm yourself with self-education.

If you have chronic pain, you may feel as though you may never find your way out. But you can find help.

One possibility is to find an online support network at the American Chronic Pain Association. It will help you navigate what it refers to as the “maze of pain.”

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