Recent findings published on 5th August in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide information about unconscious bias in pain experiences between different sexes.
Women are viewed as exaggerating or hysterical and men are viewed as more stoic when they complain of pain.Alex Gileles-Hillel, Physician-Scientist, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem
Minimizing women's pain:
Gileles-Hillel and his colleagues analyzed around 20,000 discharge notes of patients who came into emergency departments in Israeli and US hospitals with a non-specific pain complaint, they found the following results, women were 10% less than men who had recorded pain score, women had to wait 30 minutes longer than men to see a physician, and were less likely to receive pain medication.
Gileles-Hillel also mentions that this trend was going on irrespective of the gender of the doctor or the nurse.
The research was conducted providing professional health care providers to analyze identical cases but only change in the gender of the patient and noticed that the participants consistently gave higher pain scores to the male patient than the female patient.
Diane Hoffmann, a health-care-law researcher at the University of Maryland in Baltimore says that this ill-treatment and bias should be highlighted during medical training to equip the physician with a better understanding of pain and the potential for bias.
When asked Gileles-Hillel if there was any potential immediate solution he suggested the integration of computers to provide painkillers when he mentioned certain pain scores irrespective of gender and even physicians are not aware of this bias he said that raising awareness is what we can do.
(Input from various media sources)
(Rehash/Pothana Boyina Venkata Sai Vara Prasad/MSM)