A new study reveals disparities in treatment between men and women who arrive in emergency rooms with pain symptoms. Women are less likely to receive prescriptions for painkillers compared to men with similar complaints. This bias exists in all age groups, pain levels and gender of doctors, which indicates a systemic problem
A new study led by a group of researchers from the Hebrew University, Hadassah Medical Center, University of Missouri and Marshall University has revealed an alarming gender bias in pain management decisions in emergency rooms. The study, published in the journal PNAS, analyzed over 21,000 patient records in the United States and Israel and found that women are less likely to receive prescriptions for painkillers compared to men with similar complaints.
The study found that women received less pain medication than men, even after taking into account reported pain levels and other factors such as age, medical history and type of complaint. This points to a systemic problem where women's pain is not taken as seriously or treated as aggressively as men's pain.
Prof. Shoham Hoshan-Hillel and Mika Guzikevich from the Hebrew University, Dr. Alex Gilles-Hillel from the Hebrew University-Hadassa Medical Center, Dr. Tom Gordon-Haker from Ben-Gurion University and an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University, Hadassah Medical Center, and as mentioned, participated in the study Researchers from the University of Missouri and Marshall University.
Through an analysis of electronic medical records from the American and Israeli health systems, the researchers presented evidence that a female patient sent from the emergency room is less likely to receive treatment for a pain complaint compared to a male patient. Specifically, data from emergency rooms in the US and Israel, with a total sample size of 21,851 discharge records, showed that women were less likely to be prescribed any pain relievers, both opioid and non-opioid, than men.
Women with complaints of pain are less likely to receive painkillers for any pain score and in any age group, and receive fewer painkillers from both male and female doctors. In addition, women spend an additional 30 minutes in the emergency room, and their pain score will be recorded 10% lower by the nurses in the emergency room. In a controlled trial involving 109 nurses, it turned out that the intensity of pain recorded was less intense if the patient was told that she was a woman rather than a man, suggesting that the bias is due to gender stereotypes. According to the authors, insufficient treatment of women's pain has immediate consequences for the health system and broad consequences for society's attitudes towards women's pain.
Another interesting detail that the study found is that the disparity in giving painkillers exists regardless of the gender of the attending physician. Both male and female doctors were less likely to prescribe pain medication to women, indicating that the bias is widespread and not limited to one gender of health care professionals.
The study also highlighted that nurses were 10% less likely to record pain scores for women compared to men. This lack of documentation can contribute to an underestimation of the severity of the women's pain and cause inappropriate treatment. In addition, the study found that women spend an average of 30 minutes more in the emergency room than men. This delay can be due to a variety of factors, including the potential for underreporting of pain or symptoms.
In a controlled experiment, nurses judged women's pain as less intense than men's when exposed to identical clinical scenarios. This suggests that there may be a subconscious bias in how healthcare professionals perceive and assess pain based on the patient's gender.
"Our study reveals a worrying bias in the way women's pain is perceived and treated in emergency situations," said Prof. Hoshan-Hillel. "Inadequate treatment of women's pain can cause serious consequences for their health, including longer recovery times, complications or chronic pain conditions."
Recommendations Due to the study's claim that these findings reflect a lack of systematic treatment of women's pain in the health systems, the researchers call for urgent policy interventions to deal with this bias and ensure equal treatment of pain regardless of gender. They recommend training programs for healthcare professionals to identify and address gender bias, and suggest updating and standardizing pain management protocols to ensure fair and adequate care for all patients.
This study highlights the critical need to address unconscious biases in healthcare in order to provide fair and effective care to all patients.
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One response
Pain is a subjective thing, everyone will experience the same injury in a different way, the injury will bother them in a different way. That's why the pain scale in the hospitals is also subjective, it is possible that for the same pain, one person will write that the pain is a grade 6 and his friend will write a grade 8, so when the nurses have to give a score to the pain, they examine both what the patient wrote but also what they see, for example crying, complaints And then they perfect everything they see. It may be that the conclusion of the study is that women feel the pain differently than men.