Women have been gaslit for so long they no longer believe their own pain

About five years ago, after I fell over and fractured my wrist in three places, a doctor asked why it had taken me so long to get an X-ray.

“Did it not hurt?” she asked me, perplexed.

The Victorian government has launched an inquiry into women’s pain.Credit: iStock

By that stage, three days had passed since my tumble and the pain that began in my wrist had extended to my elbow. A relentless pulsing kept me awake at night, the intensity eventually boiling over and causing me to vomit before I finally conceded I might need to get it checked out.

“It kills,” I told the doctor. “But I thought I must have been imagining it.”

My belief that this level of pain was a figment of my imagination wasn’t something I invented on the spot. Like many women, it was formed over many years, with the help of many medical professionals and many experiences.

As the Victorian government is likely learning since launching its inquiry into women’s pain last week – an Australian first – the practice of medical gaslighting, where women’s pain is either minimised or not believed, remains depressingly pervasive.

Ask any woman, and either they or someone they know has experienced this. They present to medical professionals with the hope of having their pain diagnosed and treated, only to be sent away with a sense of uncertainty and confusion. Sometimes it’s big – having period pain so severe it feels as if you might black out being described as “just part of being a woman”, only to be diagnosed as endometriosis years later. But it can be small, too – a pharmacist recommending you try yoga to treat migraines instead of taking the medicine prescribed by a doctor, or a nurse asking if you’ve tried taking Panadol when you present to a hospital emergency department in searing agony.

Through all of this, we’re good sports. We get blood tests and take out private health insurance coverage we can barely afford. We stare at the ceiling while lying on examination tables and submit to being poked and prodded, hoping that the answer to why our body has chosen to betray us or to be disobedient can be easily found. We enrol in yoga classes and stifle the urge to scream when asked stupid questions. We say thank you and accept what we are told (or not told), book in the follow-up appointment and walk back into the world as if none of it has happened.

Over time, you can’t help but start thinking that maybe you’re being dramatic. Or that you must have a low pain threshold. Or that asking your GP about a different medical issue could make you seem like an attention seeker or a hypochondriac.

All of these experiences, and the countless others that women hear or endure in the health system, slowly find each other and unite, quietly building away in the back of your subconscious. Sometimes, this ever-growing dossier exists but remains powerless, and the ability to believe in your own symptoms is never lost. But sometimes, it isn’t until you find yourself saying out loud that you thought you’d imagined a broken wrist that you realise the combined power all of those moments have over you.

One of the stated primary aims of the government’s inquiry is to investigate what the gender pain gap looks like today, and how it can be addressed so that future generations of women and girls aren’t forced to endure these experiences. While that is a wholly good thing, for any change to be meaningful and long-term, a mass unlearning will also need to occur.

There is the unlearning of unconscious biases that medical professionals must embark on before relearning that women generally experience more recurrent, severe and long-term pain than men, that chronic illness is more common in women, and that despite these facts, women are still less likely to receive the same level of treatment or pain relief than men.

But it is also an unlearning of phrases like “it’s not that bad” and “I’ll power through”. Unlearning that finding refuge on cool bathroom tiles or curled up in the foetal position with hot water bottles isn’t normal. Relearning that if one doctor is dismissive, you should find another and keep going until the source of the pain is diagnosed and treated.

This lasting distrust in ourselves, in the messages our bodies are sending when they emit pain, is perhaps the most painful experience of all. The searing, stabbing, throbbing, aching experiences all eventually pass. But the inability to trust your own body is a pain that lasts much longer.

Katy Hall is deputy opinion editor.

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