Opinion
‘We offer anaesthetic but only men need it’: The persistent myth about pain
Wendy Tuohy
Senior writerIt was an innocent comment from a better-than-wonderful nurse, but it confirmed what medical experts have told me on repeat: in standard medical training, in Australia, women’s health and how our bodies work is worse than an afterthought.
I was in my excellent skin doctor’s surgery, waiting to get some persistent sun spots burnt off by laser. I was warned the procedure – involving some evil cream, then eight minutes of hot light on each hand and my face – would be painful. (It was.)
Many studies have demonstrated women are more sensitive to pain.Credit: iStock
Lovely nurse said: “We do offer some local anaesthetic for the pain, but it’s usually only the men who need it.” There was, I should state, no hint of misandry.
But why would the idea persist, even in the minds of male patients, that guys need more pain relief?
It’s probably down to medical gender fallacy number one, which remains alive and well despite being long disproved: women have a higher pain threshold.
Why would this sexist urban myth be? Because we live with periods, a range of painful reproductive conditions and birth? Whatever ...
I’ve interviewed a woman whose endometriosis pain was so bad she suddenly had to pull over the car and vomit, then lie in a ball on the cool nature strip until the nausea passed. Yet so many women have to bang down so many doors to get answers, one recent study showed time to diagnosis of the often-debilitating pain condition has blown out from seven to nine years.
I wonder if blokes finding themselves crawling around their bedroom floor in agony would expect and get a somewhat speedier service?
Just for the record, American behavioral neuroscientist Professor Jeffrey Mogil (who studies sex-differences in pain) was quoted in the journal Science Live in July reminding us that “hundreds of studies” have shown women have greater sensitivity to pain than men.
“It is well known that females are more sensitive to pain than males,” he says.
Like other persistent tropes about women with genuine illness, the idea we over-react with “hysteria” is stubborn.
Statistics and large surveys here and overseas show women are often prescribed anxiety medication when complaining repeatedly of pain, receive less pain-killing medication than men and get it – and often diagnosis (including for heart attacks) – later.
Some are so gaslit or dismissed when they seek help for symptoms that their disease progresses to a much worse stage before they are taken seriously.
Their harrowing first-hand experiences of what are undoubtedly gender-based interactions with health providers has left me in no doubt that the controversial label “medical misogyny” has plenty of grounds in fact.
When we asked readers to tell us what they had lived through in terms of gender-biased health interactions, we received 500 often distressingly detailed responses from women in just 48 hours.
They told of being dismissed, belittled, or having their real symptoms trivialised or written off as “in their head”. It is disturbing reading that shows everyday sexism can be a matter of life or death.
I don’t believe health professionals are standout chauvinists, far from it. Like police or emergency services, or any other large employment sector, they reflect the society they’re in; one in which Medicare rebates are higher for a scan of a scrotum or colon than for a womb – and where the condition of hysteria was only removed from the mental health diagnostic manual in 1980.
I am certain many doctors are allies in the project of dismantling this damaging sexism.
As obstetrician Nisha Khot told me, health professionals in this country can only reflect what they’re taught, and education about women’s health is woefully lacking. The textbooks are not even compelled to account for sex and gender differences.
When women go to see their health carer and bare our souls – and often much more – we are frequently at our most vulnerable. We are, as Manhattan breast surgeon Dr Elizabeth Comen wrote in her 2024 book All in Her Head, subject to “the anxious woman” being “a default diagnosis”. As a result, women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men are and take longer to be diagnosed with heart disease and some cancers.
And, of course, they may be less likely to be offered pain medication, she told The New York Times.
Though I’m grateful to have received a lifetime of excellent care from Australian doctors, one comment made on introduction to an influential specialist remains typical of our backward attitudes to women.
As I walked into his rooms, he confided that he was in trouble with the “feminist Taliban” for suggesting on radio that while women want to wait for Mr Right, if they want babies they should settle for Mr Good Enough. Actually, I reckon we’d happily settle for Mr Equal Rights.
Wendy Tuohy is a senior writer.
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