Fibromyalgia does not affect mostly women

Almost everyone thinks that almost everyone with fibromyalgia is a woman, with a traditionally accepted proportion of greater than ninety percent. Imagine my surprise when I learned that this immense gender gap was never supported by good data!

Wolfe et al used validated criteria and unbiased selection of patients to get a female proportion of less than 60%.

That’s quite the difference! That’s only a minor gender gap, not an immense one.

In an ironic twist, this distortion was probably created by sexism, and it surely perpetuates it. Srinivasan et al reported that physician diagnosis is wildly out of sync with diagnostic criteria: “clearly most physicians do not know or pay attention to criteria,” and their judgement is also “biased with respect to sex.” In other words, women are much more likely to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia if they have any symptoms that seem fibromyalgia-ish … even if they don’t actually have fibromyalgia.

And if you’re a man with fibromyalgia? You are unlikely to get diagnosed with it!

Fibromyalgia is the most important and glaring example of the medical myth of feminine fragility: see Chronic Pain and Inequality: The role of racism, sexism, queerphobia, ageism, and poverty in health and chronic pain.