Chronic Pain More Common In Women, Often Disbelieved By Doctors

Agenceis

If you are among the one in five adult Australians experiencing chronic pain, then you are more likely to be female.

Not only that, if you're female you're less likely to be prescribed or recommended medication by your doctor be they male or female.

That's because, as a recent experimental study of simulated and actual chronic pain patients showed, clinicians underestimate pain in female patients.

This is not a uniquely Australian phenomenon: Gender differences in the experiences and treatment of pain holds true across many different age groups, countries, and causes of chronic pain.

This issue is finally starting to get the attention it deserves.

The Australian federal government has recently established a National Women's Health Advisory Council to address systemic challenges that have led to poorer health outcomes for girls and women.

Chronic pain is in the mix here: "Women have told me they're being seen but not believed," Federal MP Ged Kearney said when launching initiative. "They seek help for crippling pelvic pain as teenagers but suffer into adulthood from raging endometriosis." In January, the state of Victoria also announced an Australia-first inquiry into women's pain in an attempt to tackle "pain and stigma" around the issue.

This follows the National Action Plan for Endometriosis, launched in 2018. Researchers are increasingly studying women and their pain, too helping patients give voice to their experiences.

Women living with pain are sending clear messages about what they want from clinicians. These include being listened to, having their pain accepted as being real, and having their concerns acknowledged and responded to.

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) has named 2024 the Global Year about Sex and Gender Disparities in Pain.

Of mice and men (but not women)

The pain is real. Chronic pain that interferes with daily activities can have a profound impact on both quality of, and engagement with life across women's lives. But women's experiences of pain have often been overlooked in both the healthcare system and medical research.

Research gaps are found across the full spectrum of research: from preclinical studies to health services research that is, how women living with pain interact with the health system .

Most animal studies in the pain field have, to date, been conducted in male mice. In general, fewer women are recruited to clinical trials of new drugs and other interventions for pain conditions that are not specific to men or women.

It wasn't until 1994 that, in the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalisation Act promoted recruitment of women into NIH-funded studies. In the UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Research issued guidance on sex and gender in 2020.

Progress has been disappointingly slow. This was recently called out as an enduring international scandal by Kamran Abbasi, the editor-in-chief of BMJ, one of the world's leading medical journals.

As Abbasi wrote, "funders, institutions, research ethics committees, medical journals and publishers, individual researchers and cliniciansas is the case with clinical platform trialscan all play a part" in bringing about this change. Consider the overlapping experiences of women's lives