来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年6月23日
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Today, many women still have their reports of pain invalidated, discredited and minimised, especially when compared with those of men. This form of bias is called the gender pain gap, and it is rooted in stereotypes about pain that have been ingrained into medical discourse about female bodies and illnesses over centuries. Research into the gap and the biases that support it is far more recent.
今天，许多女性的疼痛报告仍然被否定、怀疑和极力贬低，尤其是与男性相比。这种形式的偏见被称为性别疼痛差距，它根植于几个世纪以来关于疼痛的刻板印象，这些刻板印象已经在关于女性身体和疾病的医学话语中根深蒂固。对这种差距和支持这种偏见的研究是最近才进行的。
An increasing number of studies have shown how bias against women’s expressions of pain negatively affect diagnosis and treatment of their health conditions. A 2018 study analysing journal papers on sex, gender and pain published in the UK, US and Europe since 2001 revealed that terms like sensitive, complaining and, indeed, hysterical are applied more frequently to pain reports from women.
越来越多的研究表明，对妇女表达疼痛的偏见如何对其健康状况的诊断和治疗产生负面影响。2018年的一项研究分析了2001年以来在英国、美国和欧洲发表的关于性、性别和疼痛的期刊论文，发现敏感、抱怨、甚至歇斯底里等术语更频繁地用于女性的疼痛报告。
When women’s physical pain is dismissed as exaggerated and imaginary, or misdiagnosed as psychological, their health and lives are measurably affected. Women in US emergency departments reportedly wait, on average, 16 minutes longer than men to receive medication after first reporting abdominal pain, and they are 7 per cent less likely to receive that treatment in the first place. UK studies show that misinterpretations of female pain as anxiety contribute to women being around 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack.
当女性身体上的疼痛被认为是夸大和虚构的，或者被误诊为心理上的时，她们的健康和生活就会受到明显的影响。据报道，美国急诊科的女性在首次报告腹痛后，平均比男性多等待16分钟才能接受药物治疗，而且她们首先接受治疗的可能性比男性低7%。英国的研究表明，将女性疼痛误解为焦虑会导致女性在心脏病发作后被误诊的可能性增加约50%。
Globally, women experience more chronic pain than men. With the burden of pain-causing diseases rising in women across the world, it is crucial that the causes and consequences of disparities in clinical responses are properly understood, addressed and mitigated against. Bias awareness training, gender-sensitive diagnostic processes and increased research into the biological and psychosocial bases of pain differences could all help.
在全球范围内，女性比男性经历更多的慢性疼痛。随着引起疼痛的疾病在全世界妇女中的负担不断增加，正确理解、解决和减轻临床反应差异的原因和后果至关重要。偏见意识培训、对性别问题有敏感认识的诊断过程以及对疼痛差异的生物学和心理社会学基础的更多研究都会有所帮助。
Although hysteria as a diagnosis is thankfully obsolete, health professionals still evoke it when they judge a woman’s expressions of pain to be neither credible nor valuable. We must aim to put an end to the gender pain gap.
谢天谢地，歇斯底里症作为一种诊断已经过时，但当卫生专业人员判断一名女性的疼痛表情既不可信也没有价值时，他们仍然会想起歇斯底里症。我们必须致力于消除性别痛苦差距。