“It’s all in your head.” What woman hasn’t been confronted with this medical “diagnosis” when she goes to the doctor for some kind of pain? In the health field, as in many other areas, women often take a back seat. It has long been proven today that they are at increased risk of being underdiagnosed, whether it is a health problem that is typically female (particularly related to the reproductive system, such as endometriosis, which takes an average of ten years to diagnose) or a disorder that a man might have had. It is also known that, in medical research, diseases that chronically affect women are understudied compared to those affecting men. Now, a new study is driving the point home by revealing particularly worrying results. According to work published in August in the journal Pnas, Pain perception is taken less seriously by caregivers when the patient is a woman. Women are also taken to the emergency room on average 30 minutes later than men.
To reach this sad conclusion, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) presented a fake medical case to 109 nurses at a hospital in Missouri (United States). In the latter, the patient complained of very severe back pain and was asked to rate its intensity on a scale of 1 to 10. While he always answered 9, the nurses had to estimate his pain from 0 (no pain) to 100 (maximum pain). Result: the perception of the patient was more respected when the latter was a man, his pain being rated at around 80 out of 100 by the caregivers compared to 72 out of 100 if it was a woman.
Even more worrying: this assessment of pain was also the same when the nurse was a woman. Thus this bias would be shared by the entire medical profession. Women are seen as exaggerating their pain, while men are seen as being more stoic in the face of pain.”analyzes the director of the study, Alex Gileles-Hillel, at Nature.
A delay in support
Unsurprisingly, this disparity has dramatic consequences for how women are treated in emergency rooms. In their work, the researchers also analyzed data from 21,000 individuals who visited hospital emergency rooms in Israel or the United States between 2015 and 2019. When the visit was not due to an accident and without apparent cause, its feelings were recorded by the nursing staff 10% less frequently for women than for men.
As a result, women were 38% likely to be prescribed painkillers compared to 47% of men. In addition, they waited an average of 30 minutes longer in the emergency room before being treated.
“We argue that patients are receiving less pain treatment than they should, which can negatively impact their health. The findings highlight the critical need to address psychological bias in healthcare settings to ensure fair and effective treatment for all,” therefore conclude the researchers.
Cases often considered less serious in women
This study is not the first to highlight this gender bias. In June 2024, a study published in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine by researchers from the University of Montpellier had already shown that the same case was often assessed differently depending on the patient’s gender. In this work, 1,563 doctors or nurses were asked to assess the severity of the case of a fake patient in the emergency room. The symptoms were always the same (chest pain), as was the medical history (former smoker, history of depression). The only variation: the patient’s photo. They were presented with either a man or a woman. The result: 62% of the caregivers questioned considered the case serious when the patient was a man, compared to 49% when it was a woman. In the same vein, on a scale of 0 to 10, the pain was rated on average at 6 for men and 5.4 for women.
As a reminder, in 2020, in its prospective analysis report “Sex, gender and health” The High Authority for Health (HAS) indicated that “gender differences are numerous, insufficiently documented, too often ignored, and sometimes sources of health inequities.”
Source: www.topsante.com
