Pain and Prejudice: A Call to Arms for Women and Their Bodies

by Gabrielle Jackson

Women are treated as unreliable witnesses to their own health, while diseases that mainly affect them are under-researched; even when it comes to diseases that affect both women and men, symptoms and treatments are mainly studied in men, which leads to misdiagnosis and under-treatment in women.

In medicine, man is the default human being. Any deviation is atypical, abnormal, deficient.

Women’s general ignorance about our bodies doesn’t seem to have arisen by accident but rather by design. Why aren’t school-children taught the correct names for female anatomy? Why is menstruation a topic that must be discussed in hushed tones? And the myths

Medicine has even dreamt up a new illness—‘medically unexplained symptoms’—that has deep connotations of hysteria, hypochondria and attention-seeking. And what’s one of the major risk factors for ‘medically unexplained symptoms’? Being a woman.

Women wait longer for pain medication than men,18 are more likely to have their physical symptoms ascribed to mental health issues,19 and are more likely to have their heart disease misdiagnosed,20 become disabled after a stroke,21 suffer from illnesses ignored or denied by the medical profession, and wait longer to be diagnosed for cancer.

Jane Ussher, a professor of women’s health psychology at Western Sydney University, documents in her fascinating 2006 book, Managing the Monstrous Feminine, that most of the psychological symptoms women put down to PMS were reactions to stresses in their lives that they silenced for the rest of the month.

sums up hysteria for me simply as: ‘It’s a biological way of explaining why women don’t act the way that we expect them to act.’

These women had received 73 different diagnoses to explain the cause of their pain, and reported that their physician implied “nothing was wrong” if no physical cause of pain could be identified. More than half the women said that on occasion they felt that the doctor was not taking their pain seriously or that the doctor expected them to put up with their pain.’

One key study of the effect of hormones in pain was undertaken in transgender men and women over the process of transition. Those who transitioned to women developed more pain conditions after transition and an increase in pain severity of pain conditions present before transition. Those who transitioned to men reported a decrease in pain after they transitioned.48 Those hormones certainly seem to have a role.

Still, medicine persisted with the belief that all other organs and functions would operate the same in men and women, so there was no need to study women. Conversely, researchers said that the menstrual cycle—and varied release of hormones throughout the cycle in rodents—introduced too many variables into a study, therefore females couldn’t be studied.