Photo Credit: iStock.com/eternalcreative

TikTok videos on pain in women reveal widespread negative experiences and highlight the need for better pain recognition and care for women.  

According to the study published in the June 2025 issue of the Journal of Pain, the content, characteristics, and engagement metrics of the top 100 TikTok videos related to pain in women using TikTok’s proprietary search algorithm were analyzed.   

TikTok emerged as a widely used platform for sharing health-related content and personal experiences, yet little was known about how pain was represented on social media in women, mainly.   

They screened 140 TikTok videos for preliminary review and analyzed the first 100 that met the inclusion criteria. Qualitative content analysis was performed to identify 15 distinct content categories.  

The results showed that 66.6% (10/15) of the content categories identified in the top 100 TikTok videos on pain reflected negative experiences in women, including “visual depiction of being in pain,” “minimizing/dismissing/gaslighting women’s pain,” “ineffective pain treatment,” “women’s pain not being investigated enough,” and “assuming women’s pain is due to menstruation, motherhood, or mental health issues.” The videos collectively received 338.8 million views and 35.1 million likes. Many of the content creators (76.0%) were not healthcare professionals. The engagement rate peaked at 15.0% for the category “women’s pain is not understood by others” (15.0%).  

Investigators concluded that TikTok content on pain predominantly reflected negative experiences in women, highlighting the critical need for better pain care and management strategies for women. 

Source: jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(25)00688-1/abstract