123
Women suffer more pain than men across the whole body, major global study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
123 points (91.8% liked)
Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related
4545 readers
192 users here now
Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They didn't, though they do mention pain is complicated to study specifically because diagnosing it necessarily relies on self reporting. This unfortunately makes it virtually impossible to account for that fact. If someone tells you they have some level of pain, there is very little to nothing you can do to know if they are over exaggeratjng, under exaggerating or doing neither.
A more accurate headline would be that women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain.
There is no difference between reporting and experiencing a high level of pain unless you believe women as a group lie or exaggerate about it.
I would recommend you educate yourself on the limitations of surveys in scientific research. Humans have subjective responses to survey questions. It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the results, without accusing anyone of lying or exaggerating. Understanding the experience of another person fully is impossible, and one of the core problems philosophers, scientists, and artists gave been wrestling with fot as long as humans have been sentient.
It is all the more reasonable to be skeptical of the ridiculous headlines from an outlet like the Guardian attaches to stories like these. It is stoking the flames of gender conflict to get clicks rather than providing any useful information.
If there’s something specific you’d like to address about my point feel free, because this just reads like “nuh-uh.” What evidence do you have that women, as a group, are more likely to over-report pain? What mechanism do you suggest would lead to women as a group over-reporting pain, since individual differences are flattened out in a sufficient sample size? Why is it consistent across 118 countries if it’s not something that is measurably occurring?
You accuse the Guardian of engaging in gender war clickbait while denying the findings of a scientific study? Doesn’t seem scientific to me.
Out of curiosity, would you also say this about a study with men and social isolation (another entirely self reported metric)? How skeptical would you be that they really feel isolated? If there’s a difference you should interrogate why.
I have absolutely 0 evidence for that because I never made that claim at all. That would an incredibly dumb claim to make. You're arguing in bad faith on behalf of a divisive culture war and putting words in mouth.
I accuse the Guardian of engaging in click bait in general. That's a significant portion of their business model.
This post is not the findings of a scientific study. It's a headline ans an entertainment article which is vaguely referencing an actual scientific study in an actual academic journal. That paper is titled "Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries", not "Womrn Suffer More Pain Than Men..."
I never made any claims as to the "scientific" quality of this, and i'm really confused as to why you are suddenly focusing so hard on the word "science". FYI- tossing the word "science" around is usually not very effective at convincing people you are right.
This is an oddly phrased question but I'll try to read between the lines at what you're getting at here. "loneliness" is a far more abstract concept to even try to measure, so any results will be even more subject to the limitations of surveys than pain. It would be far more accurate to state "X group reports loneliness at a higher rate than Y group" rather than staying "X group experiences more loneliness than Y". The whole point i'm making is that the word "experiences" is different from the word "reports".
"Male loneliness" is just "loneliness" with more gender war spin applied to it. Loneliness is reportedly increasing across all genders, age groups, and pretty much any other way you slice it in countries with broad access to the internet.
Were you aware studies consist of more than a title?
Trying to spin this with philosophy about how knowable another person’s pain is frankly a horseshit response to a finding about a group that is taken less seriously in medical settings about the legitimacy of their pain.
Once again, the actual academics in the study use the phrasing "reported" rather than "experienced". Which is what is said is the better way to do it. The scientific paper is correct, the Guardian is sensationalist.
better question is, when isn't the Guardian sensationalist?
it's a known fact it has a left leaning bias, so of course it's going to sensationalize an academic study along those lines. they systematically lean into gender war stuff where they elevate women and denigrate men, because that's the standard leftist bias and it what scores the most clicks with their readership.
Right, the study reports this correctly. The article does not.
Implying a point is incorrect because it is philosophical makes no sense, as you said that's just going "nuh uh" and if there is something specifically wrong you should be able to point it out.
paul wasn't saying they definitely feel less pain than they report; he was saying that this study can only measure their reported pain, not their actual pain. He does not need to give you the specific disproof you are looking for because he is not claiming the study's conclusion is definitely false, just that its methodology is not sufficient to prove its conclusion.
That’s true of the men in the study as well, so why is the data about their pain more trustworthy? You need to come up with an explanation for why women or men would nearly universally, cross-culturally engage in over or under reporting without even knowing it if you’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and claim it’s all unknowable.
I should really stop responding if you aren't going to read the thread. Tl;dr: Their data is not any more reliable and it's insane that you think that claim was being made at any point.
And "You need to come up with an explanation"-- no, we don't. The article's title is an illogical claim to make based on the study's methodology. Pointing that out does not require coming up with a reason why the two values (reported vs experienced pain) might differ, it only requires pointing out that they are not necessarily correlated. The authors of the study knew this, which is why they did not make the claim that the article is making.
i mean, you're arguing with someone who is repeatedly demonstrated they don't care about science. they care about pushing an ideological gender narrative that women are superior to men, that agrees with the sensationalized reporting in the article.
they are engaging in bias confirmation and fighting back against anyone whose comments don't agree with their own bias.
‘All pain study findings are fake because you can’t objectively measure it’ is an even worse response to the findings.
It's also a more correct response though. The idea is to point out a potential flaw in the conclusion drawn from the study, not to say that it should be entirely ignored. Recognizing what is and is not being measured to identify limitations is like science 101, it's taught in every science class in school, and yet the article fails to do it; so we are doing it instead.
It absolutely isn’t ’more correct’, and it’s absurd to act like it’s scientific to pretend these basic questions aren’t addressed in study design. Go dig up the specific quotes from the study that demonstrate the specific methodology you have a problem with, you are not a better scientist than someone published in fucking Nature with this incredibly basic complaint about pain studies.
You have to be trolling. Again, the study is fine. The article's title is the thing drawing an unsupported conclusion. I've said this before:
I will not respond further. Please read arguments before responding to them.
Or men as a group lie and minimize their own discomfort?
Why jump immediately to the worst possible interpretation?
frankly, given our patriarchy and internalized misogyny it's far more likely the men are lying - or more precisely, deluding themselves - to protect their ego
How is ‘actually it’s men that lie as a group’ better than saying the same of women?
a) the other reply makes the point about men feeling internalized societal pressure to appear "tough"
b) you need to assess your biases that made you assume the OC was taking a shot at women, or even a shot at either gender. You jumped directly to the worst possible interpretation when there are many other ways to read the OC's intent
It isn't, but the point is that men likely do, because of societal pressure to be seen as tough, and unbothered by pain. Seriously, did you not even read the top level comment of this thread ?
Just a troll in the wild.
Or, you know, men as a group Underexaggaurate about it, which is literally the verbarim stated point of the comment I'm replying too. Did you even read the stuff you're replying too
Conversations move along, you’re the one that was trying to make a distinction between what women claim they experience and what they actually experience. And that’s what I responded to, since it would make no damn sense to take up something you said with the OC.
If you think what I wrote even remotely implies that women lie about their pain level as a group, then you have the reading comprehension of a child.
I wrote "Women report higher levels of pain" because I was (fucking obviously) rephrasing the actual headline in a more accurate rigorous way. The study was about self reported pain, so an accurate headline should use the word "reported" because that's what the study is about. It's not a study on actual pain experience, it's a study on self reported pain. That doesn't imply that anyone is lying about anything, much less that one specific group is, it's just basic accuracy and rigor, and I wrote "women" in the example headline because I was obviously rephrasing the orignal headline and the original headline used women. Also, you know, if, hypothetically both genders EXPERIENCE the same level of pain, BOTH women over exaggerating OR men underexagguraring would lead to higher reported pain by women, so writing that women report, but do not experience higher levels of pain doesn't actually give any implication whatsoever about which gender is the one misrepresening, it only implies that (at least) one group is, not which. And since the previous comment was specifically about men under reporting pain, I was obviously talking about the possibility of a split between actual and reported pain existing because of men misrepresenting it as a group, not women. So you jumping to the conclusion that I'm claiming women are lying about their pain levels is ridiculous and does not even remotely in any way whatsoever flow from anything I wrote.
For clarity, you’re saying it’s an insane reach to read this as claiming there is a mismatch between what women experience and what they report? The literal words you wrote that said ‘women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain’? And you believe I’m the one that can’t read?
That is not what you claimed. You used the phrase "lying or exaggerating", implying a conscious intent to decieve.
Additionally, Devial was comparing the two headlines, not women, when using "report" vs "experience". They were not suggesting the title should highlight the gap between women's reported and experienced pain, but that a title highlighting the gap in reported pain between men and women is more accurate than one that highlights the gap in experienced pain.
Yes. Because with the context of
A) the top level comment
And
B) the fact that I was obviously literally just changing the word "suffer" to "report" in the original headline
And
C) the obvious fucking fact that "Women report higher levels of pain than men (but don't necessarily experience higher levels of pain)" is a logically equivalent statement to "men report lower levels of pain than women (but don't necessarily experience lower levels of pain)" and therefore includes no insinuation about which gender is misreporting
Yes, it's extremely fucking obvious to anyone who can read what I meant.
OK, so you don't care about context. Just looking for something inciting to jump on and make an ordeal out of.
Do better.
Sorry that pointing out there was a potential logical issue with your statement made you uncomfortable. I hope you’ll be OK.