You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. None of us want to be in pain, but whose pain is taken seriously by the health care system? In our 2022 talk from TEDx Oak Park women, physician Shetal Takaria unpacks the way pain works in our brains, how it affects men and women differently,

and what happens when pain has no discernible source?

As a doctor, in the field of pain management, I work in a world where you bring us your pain,

and we treat it. We ask questions. We take the

symptoms you present. We decide what tests to run. We listen with compassion and wisdom and choose

the best course of action based on our knowledge and experience combined with science, and sometimes in a very small

window of time. As physicians, we took a sacred oath to do no harm, and the system has gone

to great lengths to teach us and set up guidelines to make sure that we treat every patient

equally and without judgment.

As we stand there in your moment of pain, we run your situation through every filter we have

to give you the best care.

And for most of us, this is more than just a job.

It's a calling.

But as we stand there in your moment,

looking at your story from all the different angles and all the different rational voices in our head

run through the decision-making process,

there's another voice in the mix.

And this voice, while it isn't rational or informed, yet it often dictates our decisions.

And we don't give it a second thought because, you see, this voice existed long before we began studying medicine.

And so we accept it as truth. And this voice sometimes calls

shots. It's what I refer to as the undiagnosed bias, and it's causing suffering and death

for many with chronic pain. I have spent the last 15 years studying pain, its cause, its treatment, and its management.

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