In August, The New York Times published a guest op-ed by a man named David Roberts who suffered from severe chronic pain for many years before finally finding relief. The piece immediately went viral, with distinguished news journalist and personality Dan Rather posting it to his Facebook page with the addendum that it could “offer hope” to some pain patients. However, for many of us in the chronic pain community, particularly women, the piece was regarded with weariness and frustration.
Consider this: women in pain are much more likely than men to receive prescriptions for sedatives, rather than pain medication, for their ailments. One study even showed women who received coronary bypass surgery were only half as likely to be prescribed painkillers, as compared to men who had undergone the same procedure. We wait an average of 65 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain in the ER in the United States, while men wait only 49 minutes.
These gender biases in our medical system can have serious and sometimes fatal repercussions. For instance, a 2000 study published in The New England Journal of Medicinefound that women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and discharged in the middle of having a heart attack. Why? Because the medical concepts of most diseases are based on understandings of male physiology, and women have altogether different symptoms than men when having a heart attack.