As I put it in my book The Painful Truth, “Pain is an unbidden guest, humanity’s shadow companion down through the ages. It is an interloper, a despoiler of dreams, a thief.” The “thief,” however, does not treat all persons equally. Chronic pain affects one group of people more frequently than any other—women.

A study published in a 2009 issue of the Journal of Pain found that women are “twice as likely to have multiple sclerosis, two to three times more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis and four times more likely to have chronic fatigue syndrome than men. As a whole, autoimmune diseases, which often include debilitating pain, strike women three times more frequently than men.”