When a male patient went to the hospital, he felt less pain when treated by a female doctor. Why?

An interesting study showed that male patients may actually suffer less if treated by female medical staff.

The team led by Anna Enskov, an anesthesiologist and intensive care consultant at Lund University in Sweden, recruited healthy participants and conducted a total of three experiments. The results showed that men felt less pain when treated by women, according to the Daily Mail, a British daily. This was recently reported.

In the first experiment, participants were given brief pain stimulation with a laser shocker on the soles of their feet. They were then asked how much pain they felt and tests were conducted to relieve the pain. At this time, the male and female examiners conducting the test wore the same clothes and used the same script.

The results showed that male participants treated by female examiners had higher pain thresholds than those treated by male examiners. A high pain threshold means less pain.

In the second experiment, participants were asked to wear a machine that emits a weak electric current to their bodies when they press a button, and to hold the button and release it when they feel a lot of pain. This test was conducted twice, once with a male examiner and once with a female examiner.

Similar to the results of the first experiment, we found that male participants were able to tolerate more pain when they were with a female examiner than when they were with a male examiner. However, this time, the same results were found for female participants.

The final experiment involved 245 patients in three different wards. Female and male investigators asked patients about their pain immediately after surgery. The results showed that male patients reported slightly less pain when asked by female investigators. On the other hand, there was no difference in female patients.

“These results provide important clues about how pain can be relieved for individual patients,” said Escove. Therefore, the difference in pain was the largest,” he said.

Professor Jonas Oksson from Skåne University Hospital in Sweden, who led this study, also said, “This study presented a clinical approach to pain relief in that it not only tested healthy individuals but also targeted patients immediately after surgery. “It can be said to be a meaningful first result,” he explained. He continued, “We hope that by including a gender perspective when evaluating pain, patients will be able to receive better pain treatment in the future.”

Previous studies have shown that female medical staff have more empathy with patients, which can lead to unspoken communication between medical staff and patients. For example, female therapists tend to smile more and make more direct eye contact, which helps the patient’s treatment process. However, it is unclear whether this alone can explain differences in pain depending on the gender of the medical staff.

The three experimental studies were recently published in several journals, including ‘the Biology of Sex Differences’, BMC Anaesthesiology and German Medical Science.