The meanings given to gender in studies on multimodal rehabilitation for patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain – a literature review

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess and describe the meanings given to “gender” in scientific publications that evaluate multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or multimodal rehabilitation for patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.

Method: A systematic literature search for papers evaluating multimodal rehabilitation was conducted. The PubMed and EBSCO databases were searched from 1995 to 2015. Two or three researchers independently read each paper, performed a quality assessment and coded meanings of gender using qualitative content analysis.

Results: Twenty-seven papers were included in the review. Gender was used very differently in the MMR studies investigated but primarily it referred to factual differences between men and women. Only one paper provided a definition of the concept of gender and how it had been used in that study. In the content analysis, the meaning of gender formed three categories: “Gender as a factual difference”, “The man is the ideal” and “Gender as a result of social role expectations”.

Conclusions: The meaning of the concept of gender in multimodal rehabilitation is undefined and needs to be developed further. The way the concept is used should be defined in the design and evaluation of multimodal rehabilitation in future studies.

Implications for rehabilitation

• Healthcare professionals should reflect on gender relations in encounters with patients, selection of patients into rehabilitation programs and design of programs.

• In rehabilitation for chronic pain the patients’ social circumstances and cultural context should be given the same consideration as biological sex and pain symptoms.

Keywords:

• Gender
• musculoskeletal
• pain
• review

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank librarian Karina Sjögren, Umeå University, for excellent help with the literature search.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declaration of interests. This study was conducted within the excellence project “Challenging Gender”, financed by the Swedish Research Council.