Do Men and Women Experience Pain Differently?

Do Men and Women Experience Pain Differently?

Pain has been an under-researched area of medicine, but today physicians are increasingly interested in the workings and treatment of various types of pain. In particular, a growing body of research exists on the different ways in which men and women may experience pain and the implications of these differences for medical treatment. Does the sex of an individual make a difference in their pain experience? Numerous researchers believe that women are more sensitive to pain than men, while others believe that the differences between the pain experiences of men and women are not significant. Over the course of my research I found that part of the problem in trying to answer the question lies in how scientists measure the pain experience of men and women.

The difference in the pain experience of men and women is an understudied area because most previous studies of pain and its potential treatments have only used men or male animals. For scientists, using only males was simpler since women have reproductive hormone cycles that could complicate the studies. The implication of this, of course, is that sex differences in the experience of pain (and in many other aspects of health) has remained an understudied area. However, in 1993 President Clinton signed the NIH Revitalization Act, which requires the inclusion of women in NIH research. In 1996 the NIH formed a Pain Research Consortium, and in 1998 the NIH held a conference entitled "Gender and Pain" (1).

At the NIH conference, some researchers argued that sex differences in pain are substantial and argued specifically that women are more sensitive to pain. For example, women report pain more often and also report it at higher levels than men. Additionally, when men and women are exposed to the same pain stimulus, women will say that they are in pain more quickly than men (1).

However, others believe that sex differences in the experience of pain may not be so significant. The higher reported pain levels of women may be due more to gender socialization than to biological differences between men and women. For example, in most laboratory pain studies women report about twenty percent more pain than men (2). However, researchers at the University of Florida examined pain reporting of chronic pain patients in a clinical setting and found that women reported only three to ten percent more pain than men, a significantly smaller difference.