Researchers looked at pain around the world and across the human lifespan, finding steepest rise happens before age 55
Women report suffering more pain than men, a major new global study has found.
That was true for all types of pain the researchers measured, and comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.
Researchers from all over the world carried out “one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date”. Data was collected from more than 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people from five years old to more than 100.
The research, published in Nature Medicine, looked at how pain, as the leading global cause of disability, was distributed both around the world and across the human lifespan.
How did they factor in the expected lower reporting from men due to the culture of “suck it up” or “grin and bear it” that seems to be more prevalent among men than women for physical/mental pain?
They can only ask. Pain is inherently very subjective. eg:
Basically the conclusions are bunk and the money spent is wasted.
I would kind of think the opposite: With a big enough & broad enough study that asks lots of extra questions you can use fancy mathematics to allow for confounders and reduce the gap between correlation & causation.
Edit: fuck, that was a long sentence.
Not that I entirely disagree with your point, but if we’re going to talk about being put off of reporting, then how about centuries of women being dismissed by medical professionals?
I understand your counterpoint, however has that behavior led to more women not sharing their pain or being louder about their pain to get past the dismissiveness? Do both sexes just bottle it up?
I think both just bottle it up. Men because they are conditioned to be stoic and women because they are conditioned to not be a bother. Most women are in pain a few days every single month but how many women do you know that go around telling everyone about it?
when you stub your toe really badly, or roll your ankle. do you tell everyone about it, or keep it to yourself?
I can’t recall ever telling anyone how I stubbed my toe.
Is that because it’s not painful or because they think it would be embarrassing though?
NEXT
They didn’t, though they do mention pain is complicated to study specifically because diagnosing it necessarily relies on self reporting. This unfortunately makes it virtually impossible to account for that fact. If someone tells you they have some level of pain, there is very little to nothing you can do to know if they are over exaggeratjng, under exaggerating or doing neither.
A more accurate headline would be that women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain.
There is no difference between reporting and experiencing a high level of pain unless you believe women as a group lie or exaggerate about it.
I would recommend you educate yourself on the limitations of surveys in scientific research. Humans have subjective responses to survey questions. It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the results, without accusing anyone of lying or exaggerating. Understanding the experience of another person fully is impossible, and one of the core problems philosophers, scientists, and artists gave been wrestling with fot as long as humans have been sentient.
It is all the more reasonable to be skeptical of the ridiculous headlines from an outlet like the Guardian attaches to stories like these. It is stoking the flames of gender conflict to get clicks rather than providing any useful information.
If there’s something specific you’d like to address about my point feel free, because this just reads like “nuh-uh.” What evidence do you have that women, as a group, are more likely to over-report pain? What mechanism do you suggest would lead to women as a group over-reporting pain, since individual differences are flattened out in a sufficient sample size? Why is it consistent across 118 countries if it’s not something that is measurably occurring?
You accuse the Guardian of engaging in gender war clickbait while denying the findings of a scientific study? Doesn’t seem scientific to me.
Out of curiosity, would you also say this about a study with men and social isolation (another entirely self reported metric)? How skeptical would you be that they really feel isolated? If there’s a difference you should interrogate why.
paul wasn’t saying they definitely feel less pain than they report; he was saying that this study can only measure their reported pain, not their actual pain. He does not need to give you the specific disproof you are looking for because he is not claiming the study’s conclusion is definitely false, just that its methodology is not sufficient to prove its conclusion.
That’s true of the men in the study as well, so why is the data about their pain more trustworthy? You need to come up with an explanation for why women or men would nearly universally, cross-culturally engage in over or under reporting without even knowing it if you’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and claim it’s all unknowable.
I should really stop responding if you aren’t going to read the thread. Tl;dr: Their data is not any more reliable and it’s insane that you think that claim was being made at any point.
And “You need to come up with an explanation”-- no, we don’t. The article’s title is an illogical claim to make based on the study’s methodology. Pointing that out does not require coming up with a reason why the two values (reported vs experienced pain) might differ, it only requires pointing out that they are not necessarily correlated. The authors of the study knew this, which is why they did not make the claim that the article is making.
What evidence do you have that women, as a group, are more likely to over-report pain?
I have absolutely 0 evidence for that because I never made that claim at all. That would an incredibly dumb claim to make. You’re arguing in bad faith on behalf of a divisive culture war and putting words in mouth.
You accuse the Guardian of engaging in gender war clickbait
I accuse the Guardian of engaging in click bait in general. That’s a significant portion of their business model.
denying the findings of a scientific study?
This post is not the findings of a scientific study. It’s a headline ans an entertainment article which is vaguely referencing an actual scientific study in an actual academic journal. That paper is titled “Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries”, not “Womrn Suffer More Pain Than Men…”
Doesn’t seem scientific to me.
I never made any claims as to the “scientific” quality of this, and i’m really confused as to why you are suddenly focusing so hard on the word “science”. FYI- tossing the word “science” around is usually not very effective at convincing people you are right.
Out of curiosity, would you also say this about a study with men and social isolation (another entirely self reported metric)
This is an oddly phrased question but I’ll try to read between the lines at what you’re getting at here. “loneliness” is a far more abstract concept to even try to measure, so any results will be even more subject to the limitations of surveys than pain. It would be far more accurate to state “X group reports loneliness at a higher rate than Y group” rather than staying “X group experiences more loneliness than Y”. The whole point i’m making is that the word “experiences” is different from the word “reports”.
“Male loneliness” is just “loneliness” with more gender war spin applied to it. Loneliness is reportedly increasing across all genders, age groups, and pretty much any other way you slice it in countries with broad access to the internet.
Were you aware studies consist of more than a title?
Drawing on individual-level data from 1.2−4.9 million distinct participants per pain site, pain prevalence varied markedly across anatomical sites and followed distinct age trajectories by site and sex (Fig. 2). Overall prevalence ranged from 2% for facial pain to 40% for back pain. Women consistently reported higher prevalence than men across all 11 sites
Trying to spin this with philosophy about how knowable another person’s pain is frankly a horseshit response to a finding about a group that is taken less seriously in medical settings about the legitimacy of their pain.
Once again, the actual academics in the study use the phrasing “reported” rather than “experienced”. Which is what is said is the better way to do it. The scientific paper is correct, the Guardian is sensationalist.
Right, the study reports this correctly. The article does not.
Implying a point is incorrect because it is philosophical makes no sense, as you said that’s just going “nuh uh” and if there is something specifically wrong you should be able to point it out.
Or men as a group lie and minimize their own discomfort?
Why jump immediately to the worst possible interpretation?
frankly, given our patriarchy and internalized misogyny it’s far more likely the men are lying - or more precisely, deluding themselves - to protect their ego
How is ‘actually it’s men that lie as a group’ better than saying the same of women?
a) the other reply makes the point about men feeling internalized societal pressure to appear “tough”
b) you need to assess your biases that made you assume the OC was taking a shot at women, or even a shot at either gender. You jumped directly to the worst possible interpretation when there are many other ways to read the OC’s intent
It isn’t, but the point is that men likely do, because of societal pressure to be seen as tough, and unbothered by pain. Seriously, did you not even read the top level comment of this thread ?
Just a troll in the wild.
Or, you know, men as a group Underexaggaurate about it, which is literally the verbarim stated point of the comment I’m replying too. Did you even read the stuff you’re replying too
Conversations move along, you’re the one that was trying to make a distinction between what women claim they experience and what they actually experience. And that’s what I responded to, since it would make no damn sense to take up something you said with the OC.
If you think what I wrote even remotely implies that women lie about their pain level as a group, then you have the reading comprehension of a child.
I wrote “Women report higher levels of pain” because I was (fucking obviously) rephrasing the actual headline in a more accurate rigorous way. The study was about self reported pain, so an accurate headline should use the word “reported” because that’s what the study is about. It’s not a study on actual pain experience, it’s a study on self reported pain. That doesn’t imply that anyone is lying about anything, much less that one specific group is, it’s just basic accuracy and rigor, and I wrote “women” in the example headline because I was obviously rephrasing the orignal headline and the original headline used women. Also, you know, if, hypothetically both genders EXPERIENCE the same level of pain, BOTH women over exaggerating OR men underexagguraring would lead to higher reported pain by women, so writing that women report, but do not experience higher levels of pain doesn’t actually give any implication whatsoever about which gender is the one misrepresening, it only implies that (at least) one group is, not which. And since the previous comment was specifically about men under reporting pain, I was obviously talking about the possibility of a split between actual and reported pain existing because of men misrepresenting it as a group, not women. So you jumping to the conclusion that I’m claiming women are lying about their pain levels is ridiculous and does not even remotely in any way whatsoever flow from anything I wrote.
A more accurate headline would be that women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain.
For clarity, you’re saying it’s an insane reach to read this as claiming there is a mismatch between what women experience and what they report? The literal words you wrote that said ‘women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain’? And you believe I’m the one that can’t read?
For clarity, you’re saying it’s an insane reach to read this as claiming there is a mismatch between what women experience and what they report?
That is not what you claimed. You used the phrase “lying or exaggerating”, implying a conscious intent to decieve.
Additionally, Devial was comparing the two headlines, not women, when using “report” vs “experience”. They were not suggesting the title should highlight the gap between women’s reported and experienced pain, but that a title highlighting the gap in reported pain between men and women is more accurate than one that highlights the gap in experienced pain.
Yes. Because with the context of
A) the top level comment
And
B) the fact that I was obviously literally just changing the word “suffer” to “report” in the original headline
And
C) the obvious fucking fact that “Women report higher levels of pain than men (but don’t necessarily experience higher levels of pain)” is a logically equivalent statement to “men report lower levels of pain than women (but don’t necessarily experience lower levels of pain)” and therefore includes no insinuation about which gender is misreporting
Yes, it’s extremely fucking obvious to anyone who can read what I meant.
OK, so you don’t care about context. Just looking for something inciting to jump on and make an ordeal out of.
Do better.
Sorry that pointing out there was a potential logical issue with your statement made you uncomfortable. I hope you’ll be OK.
Or standardize the pain scale. A 9 on the scale for me is significantly more pain than a 9 for my wife because I have both a high pain tolerance and threshold. I say 9 because I’ve never experienced what I’d consider a 10 (pain so intense I lose consciousness).
My vasectomy without anesthesia was a 9.5.
But our response to pain is largely learned.
Bro why did you do it without anesthesia? Mine with local anesthesia was already a whole ordeal I couldn’t imagine making it through with out the pain relief.
Because the surgeon didn’t believe me when I told him I have the redhead gene and am extremely tolerant to all anesthesia. For reference, it took 8mg of Versed (standard is 1-2) before I even felt it before a down the throat echo of my heart, and my last filling required so much lidocaine that it paralyzed half of my face.
He gave me a bunch of air shots, waited a few minutes, I wasn’t numb, did it again for like 20 minutes and said, Well you have to be numb now, can you feel this," then made the incision. I told him I could feel that, but he just went right along.
I was too busy diverting the pain to stop him at that point. But honestly, he was so fast that I likely would have been in pain for longer if I had stopped him and made him give me more anesthesia.
But, I basically did a speed run of the pain, because my recovery was almost completely pain and swelling free.
My doctor didn’t let the lidocaine settle on the first side… I feel you. He shot the lidocaine in and immediately cut. Hurt horribly. He immediately said sorry… but too late
Ah I did have a similar experience getting a root canal. Whatever they gave me wore off and I was so over the pain that the dead tooth was giving me I told them to just keep going. Granted I chose the pain, but I get the mindset of just getting it done and over with.
That’s kinda how it went. I had to stop to take a few breaths after he did the first one to keep from throwing up due to the vasovagal response, and he asked if I wanted to stop for more meds. I was already in the zone so I told him to keep going.
His PA and nurse were visibly bothered by the whole thing. Which is fair because they watched a guy get tortured, at least from their perspective.
But that was the day I confirmed my pain tolerance is higher than most people’s. The only reaction I displayed was saying ouch under my breath a few times. It’s problematic with stuff like exercise injuries.
It’s not really possible because your hormones affect your subjective experience of pain. Things that are not painful at all during ovulation suddenly can feel extremely painful during menstruation.
Same, which can create problems. If I say my pain level is a six, that means I’m in a lot of pain. A doctor who doesn’t know me would almost certainly assume otherwise.
Yeahhh no, just no. Women are treated so poorly by the medical system compared to men. I could go to ER with my husband to be seen for the exact same thing He’ll be:
- Seen faster than me
- Listened to instead of questioned
- Given the appropriate tests
- Leave with medication and follow ups.
I’ll be:
- Forced to wait longer times
- Questioned relentlessly (are you pregnant? nope, no longer have a uterus. We’re still gunna give you a pregnancy test because we don’t believe you).
- Will not receive any tests outside of standard baseline tests.
- Will leave with zero answers, no medication, no follow ups. Just a suggestion to drink more water and exercise.
So you men really have no room to complain about lack of reporting when its literally not even applicable to this situation.
Counterpoint: This could be in part because men seek medical care less than women (source: https://www.icgi.org/do-men-go-to-the-doctor-less-than-women/#The_Data_A_Clear_Picture_of_Disparity), therefore when one does go the medical staff assumes it must be pretty serious, and this would reinforce that the self report study may not be accurate.
That said, it would still be extremely wrong for medical staff to assume that / downplay women who go because they’re more likely to go, because then you’ll be missing important cases in women, which may also explain why women have worse outcomes in medical care as well.
Overall the situation is shit because under the current system and culture it means men die more often from medical health issues and women die more from unnecessary malpractice and negligence.
Even so, this is a cultural question, not a healthcare one. While women are treated more poorly within the healthcare system, men are exposed, outside the healthcare system, to “man up”, “suck it up”, “boys don’t cry” and a general attitude that admitting to pain is weakness and unmanly.
There may be an abundance of reporting; I would be willing to bet that male pain is better studied than female pain, because that usually seems to be the case (medical science ignoring female physiology to an almost comical degree). But, the point op was making is that the men in the studies are more likely to lie/downplay their pain because of the culture of toxic masculinity. It’s one of the ways men are victims of the patriarchy too.
“It found women’s self-reported pain across 11 bodily sites – head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee – was higher than for men.”
Self report, not really all that useful. Could be anything from “women experience more pain” to “women are encouraged to speak up about pain” to “women are less inured to pain”. I’m afraid it’s a bit clickbaity.
Self report, not really all that useful.
Why not? Pain is a subjective experience. If someone experience high levels of pain consistently, that is reason to do something about it. Someone else may experience less pain for the same cause, but that doesn’t invalidate other experiences. In the end it’s about helping people and making their lifes better.
Although for such studies it would be good indeed to factor in socialisation effects. If men are raised to suppress expressing pain when they’re in pain, while women are not, that might bias the results.
Do we have a non-invasive method for objectively measuring pain?
My issue is that it leads to more than one conclusion and we have no reason to choose one over the others.
all that, and because people lie.
lying about pain is a great way to socially manipulate the people around you.
Ever get that weird pain in your chest when you stretch or something? I can’t tell you how many phantom pains like that I get and ignore but also forget
That’s actually growing pains and eventually stops
Spoiler - it reappears in your 40s
That’s just growing old pains. Those eventually stop too.
Random pain in your 20s: “huh, weird, oh well”
Random pain in your 40s: “so this is how it ends”
I have that. I mentioned it to my doctor at my last physical. He diagnosed it as something called “slipping rib syndrome”, where some of your ribs aren’t fused properly.
I don’t see how you can do a study about pain without self reporting. No one can say how much pain another person is feeling. Thats why the hospital has that face ruler to get you to give them a number.
No-one is arguing with that; just that they have lots of possible conclusions and they chose one for no good reason.
Pretty sure that face ruler was put there to sell oxy, actually xD
I always liked it. Its like if I were to make a face for how much this hurts it would look like that one.
I do think women’s pain is under-treated, IUD insertion no pain meds, no anesthesia, a lot of GYN procedures that really hurt are done with no help.
The worst pain I have ever felt, though, is still migraine. Not childbirth (I did those unmedicated) not broken bones, migraine is by far the most intense pain I have ever felt and that is not specific to women, though more common in women.
My tattoo artist said men complain, women don’t. Not that it hurts us less, we just don’t complain. Cultural thing maybe. My husband does complain when his back hurts; I just wait it out. Though if it persisted I’d be more likely to go to the doctor than him.
So maybe some of it is self-inflicted, we don’t tell anyone we are hurting, but for God’s sake, my gynecologist is a woman she should know that shit hurts!
On the other hand, I get migraines, but they’re not even in the top three worst pain I’ve even experienced. The worst I’ve ever experienced is a mystery pelvic pain (yes, I’m also female).
Until I hit menopause I had no idea that the pain level of a migraine could vary, I have them occasionally still (not many with the steady low dose MHT and no cycles), and mostly they are about like a hangover level of headache.
Before menopause, they were uniformly at an 11/10, vomiting, crying and such intense pain I got hallucinations. Like I have no idea how one can hurt that bad without it killing you. In labor, I literally thought “well, not as bad as a migraine anyway”.
Holup. I’m still stuck on migranes being worse than childbirth with no meds. Like something literally tore off your uterus and slowly ripped the skin from your vagina to your butthole. How in the world was a headache worse than that?
I’m a woman with no kids so this is an eye opener, but also never saw birth videos so maybe I’m ignorant of things.
A heavy migraine attack is quite different from a headache. It impacts your whole system, including visual distortions, vomiting, vertigo, sensory sensitivity and mental distress
yeah I did not really understand what a migraine was till my wife was vomiting and like could not walk.
That is not how childbirth works.
What? You mean to tell me you don’t grow a new uterus for each child???
Doesn’t the placenta attach to it or something?
complain, or share their feelings?
most guys I know just state how something feels or what is currently bothering them. not complaining, just sharing information
unless it’s some type of serious headache — that shit is debilitating.
He complains. I would go so far as to say whines, lol. Partly because he can’t work out when hurt and lack of exercise makes anyone irritable. I am strong with pain but an absolute whiny baby when sick, a slight cold and I complain, I hate it so much. He hardly notices it - gets a cold about the same frequency I do (maybe once a year on average?) but it impresses him so little he thinks he gets sick less often than I do.
So it’s not that he complains more, just more about physical pain.
That is because you are a man talking to another man. Not a husband talking to his spouse. How pain is shared between partners is different than how you would talk about it with friends.
The more I learn about how periods and pregnancy can fuck up the body the more and more I’m certain women, in general, experience more pain than men on a regular basis.
The device that simulates period pain is something I feel all doctors should go through. If you know what that pain is like then I imagine you would listen more to your patients.
I’m fascinated by the existence of this device
It’s a useful education tool. If you can experience a close enough analog then you can be more aware of what someone is going through.
I’d imagine so, yeah
Completely delusional to think they wouldnt. Women literally have built in monthly pain generator for the majority of their lives.
…according to them.
Sorry, I don’t get it.
Explain the man cold, then.
Men have weaker immune systems. Which also means women tend to have more autoimmune conditions, leading to more chronic pain. Ouch.
Yeah duh…
How can women experience more pain then men when no balls to be kicked in?
than*
