Female emergency room patients are less likely to be prescribed pain medication, according to a study published Aug. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers from Israel and the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia partnered to analyze potential sex biases in pain management decisions at hospital emergency departments in both the U.S. and Israel.
The emergency department data was composed of 17,000 patient discharge records from the Hadassah University Medical Center in Israel and more than 4,000 patient discharge records from University of Missouri Health Care, according to an Aug. 5 report in Science.
The study found that among female and male patients who presented with similar pain symptoms, only 38% of female patients received pain medication, compared to 47% of male patients. The disparity occurred whether the prescribing physicians were male or female.
Researchers followed up their data analysis with an in-hospital experiment at MU Health Care. 109 hospital nurses were presented with a patient pain rating scenario and asked to rate their perception of the patient's pain. The results show the nurses perceived a patient's pain to be higher if a patient was described as a man than if the patient was described as a woman.
"We argue that the findings reflect an undertreatment of female patients' pain," the study's authors wrote. "[In the study] we discuss the troubling societal and medical implications of females' pain being overlooked and call for policy interventions to ensure equal pain treatment."