A woman’s touch: Men feel less pain when they’re treated by a female doctor, study finds
- Experts used a short laser pulse on the arch of the volunteers’ feet
- Men treated by a female ‘examiner’ had a higher pain threshold
Undergoing a painful medical procedure is never fun.
But if you’re a guy, having a female doctor could make you feel less sore, new research suggests.
A series of studies have shown that men feel less pain when treated by a woman than by another man.
Experts from Lund University in Sweden recruited healthy volunteers who were stimulated with a short laser pulse in the arch of the foot.
They found that male participants treated by a female ‘examiner’ had a higher pain threshold compared to when treated by men.
A series of studies have found that men feel less pain when treated by a woman, compared to another man (stock image)
This was the case despite the fact that the male and female examiners involved in the study were dressed the same and used the same script.
In a separate experiment, participants had to press a button that radiated a weak electrical current, then release the button when they felt pain.
The tests were administered twice: once with a male examiner and once with a female examiner.
Similar to the first study, the team found that male participants could tolerate more pain from a female experimenter than from a male one, but this time the same was true for female participants.
A final experiment involved 245 patients in three different hospital wards. A female and male researcher asked the patients about their pain shortly after surgery.
Analysis found that men, but not women, said they had slightly less pain when a woman asked.
Researcher Anna Engskov, consultant in anaesthesiology and critical care, said: ‘For the individual patient it may matter, especially given that the differences in pain were greatest when it hurt so much that patients started asking for pain relief.’
Previous research has shown that women may have more empathy, which in turn may be linked to silent communication – for example, more smiling and more direct eye contact. But it is unclear whether this could explain the results.
Professor Jonas Åkeson, from Skåne University Hospital in Malmö, supervised the study.
He said: ‘This is the first confirmation of these results, both experimentally in healthy individuals and clinically in newly operated patients.
‘Taking a gender perspective into account when evaluating pain can hopefully contribute to patients receiving even better care and pain treatment in the future.’
The research was published in several journals: the Biology of Sex Differences, BMC Anesthesiology and German Medical Science.