Researchers looked at pain around the world and across the human lifespan, finding steepest rise happens before age 55
Women report suffering more pain than men, a major new global study has found.
That was true for all types of pain the researchers measured, and comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.
Researchers from all over the world carried out “one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date”. Data was collected from more than 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people from five years old to more than 100.
The research, published in Nature Medicine, looked at how pain, as the leading global cause of disability, was distributed both around the world and across the human lifespan.
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?
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.
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.
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.