“Sometimes I don’t feel like getting up, let alone eating. The pain is such that at this point in my life I have normalized it and it is a structural part of my daily life”.

“I’ve been told it’s due to stress, not overdoing it, falling asleep when it pops up. Nothing happening. That I’m hyper emotional and sensitive.”

“I’ve been the woman in the office who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, the woman who dramatizes. If only a treating doctor had told me my pain was real, I wouldn’t have had so much trouble related to mental health.

All these reflections, belonging to five different women, are part of a collection of testimonies produced by Nurofen for the ‘See my Pain’ campaign. The focus, at the time, was to reveal that women’s pain – both physical and emotional – is often underestimated, overlooked and even downplayed and dismissed by medical professionals.

This is what the journalist and researcher Julia Buckley recently affirmed in an analysis published in the British media The Guardian where she postulated with insistence that the gap between the sexes in pain exists and that the figures corroborate it: 1 woman in 6 experience intense pain every day, but this experience is marked by constant invalidation in medical care and study, and is often rightly dismissed due to socially ingrained gender stereotypes. “Men are brave and only complain when necessary, while women complain easily,” he quotes in his analysis. “Because of these socially constructed histories, women’s pain is more likely to be pathologized or psychologized; and while men are sent for testing, women are told to monitor their stress levels or that the solution is in antidepressants.”

An example of this, as shown in the study Disparities in interpretations of heart disease symptoms by physicians by patient sex (recently published in the Journal of Women’s Health), is that of a total of 128 treating physicians surveyed in the United States, very few were completely sure when diagnosing the underlying cause of the symptoms presented by women with heart or gastrointestinal diseases. . In fact, among middle-aged women, 31.3% have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, while only 15.6% (half) of their male counterparts have been so diagnosed.

It only goes to show, as noted in the study’s findings, that women’s ailments are often misunderstood and misdiagnosed. “And living in pain without access to proper medical care has a huge impact on women’s lives. 41% of them say it causes them problems sleeping, and more than that, almost a quarter of them say the pain they feel on a daily basis has caused them to complicate mental health conditions .

Another study titled Gender disparity in analgesic treatment of emergency department patients with acute abdominal pain revealed that of the 981 patients who visited the emergency department between April 2004 and January 2005 with the same non-traumatic acute abdominal pain – and with the same duration of less than 72 hours – it was the women who received less analgesia than men (only 60% of them compared to 67% of them) and also those who were less likely to receive opioid treatments (45% compared to 56%).

This is explained by psychologist specializing in neuroscience and member of the Pain Unit of the UC Christus Health Network, María José Figueroa, who notes that in general, women are much less prescribed or treated with opioids for their pain. And that, as he delves deeper, has to do with the caregiver’s assessment when estimating the intensity of each other’s pain. “Social stigmas play a big role here, the way we have been socialized and gender stereotypes. Women not only manifest more diseases related to chronic pain, but are also more sensitive to pain due to hormonal factors. In addition, they have been socialized to express their pain more, or to verbalize in one way or another, what they feel. Therefore, the curious thing is that one could say “if women tend to express their pain more and show greater intensities, why are they sent to be treated only from mental health and that the men receive medical treatment?”, regardless of the fact that mental health is a fundamental and complementary element, in many of these cases, of the treatment,” he reflects.

“Women are much more likely to be referred to a psychologist for their pain, which is mistakenly thought to be due to something anxious or depressive. Caregivers underestimate patients’ pain and instead of looking for solutions related to organic pain, and considering how complex and multifactorial pain can be, they attribute it to supposed emotional instability.

And all of this, as it deepens, has a correlate in other psychosocial factors that can end up making the overall experience of pain more complex. “If the person who finds themselves stigmatized by their peers, their family, their colleagues and the traffickers, does not find a space in which they can freely socialize their pain and their experience, or if they feel constantly ignored, minimized and not taken into account, it is very likely that he tends to isolate himself, not to communicate what he feels and to have fewer opportunities to talk about what is happening to him, ”he explains. “A vicious circle is generated in which the same condition or its derivatives can become more complex and in which it becomes difficult to find more lasting situations; these people suddenly need to stop at work, rest, get up from their chair or make physical movements. But since pain is not seen as a valid excuse to justify these acts, or is wrongly associated with laziness, exaggeration or reversal, it is a whole situation of isolation, discomfort and more. of mood risk factors that are generated in that person.”

In these cases, this can give way to a depressed or anxious image, and having to manage states alone. Many times, even, the person ends up avoiding communicating. Many patients, as specialists explain, avoid saying what they feel because they no longer believe in it, or because they themselves do not want to feel that they are committing and reinforcing the stereotype of woman whose word does not have the same value.

It should not be forgotten that many of them, continues Figueroa, have been deceived patients for a long time. “They have come a long way before they come to a proper diagnosis. Because the complexity and totality of his evil has not been taken into account. Or it was sometimes rejected without any treatment. This often happens in patients with endometriosis or chronic pelvic pain. they are referred or the pain is ignored and they are treated differently. And when they finally arrive after not being answered, after being underestimated, or after spending time, resources and energy, and experiencing long periods of pain that complicate the images on the biopsychosomatic level, all areas are affected; both the condition itself, as well as the image of mental health and also the confidence and desire to believe again in the traffickers.

And it has always been so. As the psychologist, academic at the University Diego Portales and researcher at the Millennium Nucleus, Álvaro Jiménez explains, a historical example is that of hysteria. “It is a diagnosis widely observed in the late 19th century and early 20th century and has been designated as a fundamentally female pathology. But before it was recognized as a mental health disorder, it was associated with certain ideas of faking. Since no organic lesions were observed, the theory was that it was a simulation of suffering on the part of women. From the beginning, it was seen as a kind of theater associated with the feminine”.