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That’s why every chronic pain patient-no matter their sex or gender-needs to have a comprehensive evaluation, including a psychological assessment.

There are many nerve pathways that extend to many areas in the brain, affecting sleep, depression and anxiety. Duarte: It is important to understand that chronic pain is complex. Oftentimes it’s because they don’t have pain that fits neatly into a cookie-cutter category.Īnd some conditions, like chronic pain, do respond to mindfulness-making them more likely to be dismissed as psychosomatic.ĭr. That being said, I do still see patients who have been shuffled around to different clinicians and ended up seeing a psychologist. Women are more likely than men to experience conditions like migraines, and in the past, it was tempting to assume that it was psychosomatic. I think this is from a better understanding about chronic pain in general. Duarte: The good news is that I’ve seen a real improvement in my field over the last five years. But by doing so, they’re stripping themselves of a voice.ĭr. They feel like they need to be good patients, which means accepting what their doctors tell them. Women may have a harder time pushing back and advocating for themselves. For example, men have a tendency to be more vocal and more persistent with their concerns. Grossman: I believe that psychological and social influences contribute to women being gaslighted. How often does a woman get angry, only to be asked if she’s about to get her period? How often does a perimenopausal woman go to her doctor’s office to complain about weight gain, only to be told that it’s related to hormones? Our hormones aren’t making us anxious or upset-these condescending attitudes are.ĭr. For centuries, it was believed that the uterus itself was the cause of a woman’s “hysterical” symptoms.Īnd, unfortunately, these sorts of beliefs still carry on today. Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis for women, applied whenever women displayed “inappropriate” emotions such as anxiety, anger and even sexual desire. It’s no accident that the word “hysteria” originates from the Greek word for “uterus.” There’s still this pervasive belief in the medical community that anytime a woman complains about her health, it’s either related to her hormones or all in her head.

That’s what makes this so hard to address.ĭr.

A triage nurse may not deliberately tell a woman who comes to the ER complaining of chest pain that it’s all in her head, but she may notice that she’s very anxious and subconsciously make that assumption. We should also keep in mind that while some gaslighting is done consciously, a lot of it happens unconsciously, too. On the positive side, we are slowly expanding the educational curriculum at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell to include sex and gender, highlighting the fact that the one-size-fits-all approach to medicine negatively impacts women’s health.

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But while we’ve raised this awareness, gaps remain in diagnosing the full spectrum of coronary heart disease in women.

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In 2011, my colleagues and I published data from a trial that highlighted some of the sex and gender differences in cardiovascular disease testing. Mieres: Unfortunately, there are still big gender biases in health care.

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