November 4, 2009 • 19 mins
Studies suggest that women and men do sometimes experience pain differently. Join Molly and Cristen as they explore male and female experiences of pain -- and the implications of this gender difference -- in this episode of Stuff Mom Never Told You.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom? Never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen Christ and I'm sad today.
(00:21):
Oh Holly, where are you said? So we're talking about pain. Yeah,
it's kind of a downer. I'll try and put a
band aid on it. We'll put a banded on it. Uh,
knowing that we are going to learn things about pain
differences among men and women. That's interesting, Molly, and it
was interesting, but it was sad to research and all.
The whole reason we started researching pain is because we
(00:44):
had an email from a listener, which we love, and
it asked us whether men and women feel pain any differently,
and she cited childbirth. That's sort of what we think
of as like an epitome of painful experiences. So some
women say it's very pleasurable. I don't know if I
trust them. Yeah, you been if there's some cultural idea
that men just keep a stiff upper lip whereas girls
(01:04):
are just gonna boo who over a skin knee? Our
ultimate comeback is you're not pushing a baby out any
time during your life, So is childbirth in some way?
This is it really like the epitome of pain. If
we survive it, can we survive anything? And I did
find one really interesting study that suggests that, yes, childbirth
can increase your pain tolerance. Yeah, they compared the pain
(01:27):
threshold among women who had had children and women who
hadn't had children, and they did indeed find that Paris
woman who had experienced childbirth had a higher pain threshold
than the other women. So now that I think that's
really interesting because the rest of the stities we're going
to talk about didn't differentiate as far as I know,
(01:49):
between women who had given birth and women who hadn't.
Because this one study we found suggests that, yes, if
you give birth, then nothing will compare to that pain,
and obviously all pains are minimized as a result. But
every other show we're gonna site is gonna be pretty
depressing because it's going to suggest that women feel pain
more intensely and more often than men. And this is
a pretty recent finding. And the way that these studies
(02:13):
and the articles reporting on them were phrased, it seemed
like people were very hesitant to say, yes, there are
differences between the way men and women feel pain, and
women on the whole report feeling more pain than men,
because it does seem like a very antiquated knee jerk
reaction that implies that women are the weaker sex. But
(02:37):
as in a lot of these podcasts Molly, that we
do when we compare different things between the genders, it's
not so much an argument of better or worse, but
simply different. It's different, and it's important because obviously, if
you need a pain killer, you want something that will
work for you. And knowing that men and women not
only feel pain differently, but more intensely for some things
(02:58):
than for others, so that you can really tailor a
treatment to fit either gender better. So let's walk through
just a couple of these um certain conditions that really
affect women more than men, and this comes from the
Pain Consortium from the National Institutes of Health, and the
number one issue that really affects women nine times more
(03:20):
than men is fibromyalgia, right, which is basically just pain.
You have chronic, widespread pain all over the body, tenderness, soreness,
flue like aches, fatigue, headaches, stiffness UM and they don't
know a lot about it, but they have some evidence
that maybe UM in the brain, just the areas related
to pain perception work much differently than people who suffer
(03:41):
from fibro mayalgia. And then we have migraines. This is
something that you and I have podcasted before, because one
in five women experience migraines, whereas only one in seventeen
men experienced them, and doctors think that it might have
something to do with shifts in hormone levels, because migraines
for women often occur around obviously Asian menstruation and during pregnancy.
(04:02):
Another one is ostio arthritis. Women report more as arthritic
pain and severe pain, and also heart disease. Women in
their pre menopossal years experienced chest pain more often than men.
But there is one important difference, and we'll come back
to this a little more later on, but when it
comes to long term extreme pain, specifically things like bone cancer,
(04:27):
there is no gender difference between the amount of pain reported.
Men and women feel it exactly the pain exactly the
same way. It seems like it's a lot more to
do with acute pain and um more low level chronic
pain as opposed to long standing extreme So we we
(04:47):
brought up the difference that girls, you know, cry when
they get a skin me, whereas men are expected to
keep a stiff upper lip. So one of the first
things that these researchers did when they want to figure
out if men and women do feel pain differently is
to find out if it's all just social motivation. Yeah, basically,
did the men want to appear more macho by reporting
less pain than is actually going on. So what they
(05:10):
did was they gave women more money to participate in
a pain sete than they gave men. And first of all,
I have to say that every single pain study pretty
much is based on sticking your hand and ice water,
So maybe just women are smart enough not to do
this study. Yeah, they wanted to see how long women
or men and women would hold their hand in a
bucket of swirling ice water. And some people were offered
(05:33):
a dollar to keep their hand and I mean this
water is near freezing to keep their hand in there
for five minutes, and somewhere giving offered twenty dollars. Yeah,
so even the women who had the motivation of getting
more money, the longer they kept their hand in just
gave up, whereas men, you know, they thought men who
you know, it wasn't about society, was just about money,
would not really care as much. Men who were offered
(05:56):
more money did even better. So it suggests, you know,
it kind of disprove this whole social motivation theory because
they were at starting point and then they added the
money motivation. They did above and beyond. So whereas women,
even with the money motivation, we're just like, I still
feel the pain. Yeah, And and so they think that
there must be some kind of biological explanation for why
(06:21):
men and women experience pain differently, and research has shown
that that is exactly the case. Are different circuits in
our our bodies and brains do process pain differently. So
I want to talk about Jeanes first, Kristen, Yes, well,
let's talk about genes now, going back to childbirth, okay,
(06:44):
Gynecologists already know that women prefer certain kinds of pain
killers to other mothers and childbirth, for instance, prefer something
called now be feed as opposed to morphine. But men,
on the other hand, they love the morphine. Men prefer
the morphine. It seems to have more of a pain
relieving effect on them than the now beefine, and they
(07:07):
think that this has to do with pain opioid receptors,
which dull pain in the brain. Right, each of those
drugs binds two different receptors, and the women that now
buffine acts on cappa receptors, which are far less studied
than Mu receptors, which is what morphine binds too. And
they found that when they give a man a drug
(07:28):
that like nor buffine now buffine sorry, binds to the
cappa receptors, they don't get any pain relief at all.
In fact, sometimes they get they get more pain as
a result. So the thing that dampens pain in women's
brains doesn't dampen pain in a man's brain. And they've
even traces down to the genetic level. A doctor has
(07:49):
actually identified the first gene known to be involved in
modulating pain thresholds in women, because variations in that gene
do not do anything to a man's response on pain,
whereas if you have a variation of that gene as
a woman, you feel more pain of a lower pain threshold.
And interestingly, this gene is also related to hair and
(08:09):
skin color. So we have an article on our site
how stuff works dot Com called do redheads need more anesthesia?
And the thinking is yes, because they have such a
variation of this gene, they have a much lower pain threshold.
So we have something on the on the genetic, on
the neurological level, things that are already happening differently um
(08:30):
in our brains to process pain right and to relieve pain. Now,
let's say I stubbed my elbow on a on a
table and a male steps elbow on the table. Scientists
have figured out that just different areas of our brain
are lighting up at the very first sign of pain.
Forget the pain killer part, but just when we both
feel that pain, the man is going to feel something
in his analytic or cognitive centers, whereas when I feel
(08:53):
that pain, my emotion based limbic regions light up, oh, emotions, emotions.
And this is based on U c L A study
UM that was the tract of the PET scans pet
brain scans of patient steering mild pain stimuli, and it
was the study pool was pretty small. It was only
twenty six women and twenty four men who were experiencing
(09:13):
irritable bowel syndrome. But nevertheless, this is the largest study
to date of its kind. Now, what they did was
they felt when they found out that the different areas
of the brain lit up, they went back to evolution,
which I can't say I totally agree with. Evolutionary biology
is tricky. It is tricky. So they're saying that the
reason that a man's um cognitive centers are going to
(09:36):
light up is because the early male role was defending
the homestead. So in response to stress or pain, he's
going to be very quickly analyzing his fight or flight,
you know options. He's got to say, how am I
going to protect my homestead. I'm not going to think
about this pain an emotional way, whereas that's what they
say the women are doing because they've got to protect
not necessarily the homestead, but their child. So it has
(09:57):
the very emotional reaction to oh, must protect this child. Yeah,
the more the more nurturing response. And so I say
that evolutionary biology can be tricky because it does always
seem to go back to this like idea that you know,
men are hunters and gathers. Women are just here to
produce children and take care of the home, which does
get tiresome at times. I'm not going to moresome, but
(10:18):
I guess knowing that is a really good way to
cope with it, because um, there was the study recently
about how swearing can relieve pain, and they found that
swearing relieves pain more efficiently in women than in men
because when you swear, it's your limbic region. So by
letting loose like that quick emotional outburst to pain, um,
(10:40):
they alleviated the pain more quickly. Now, men swear all
the time, according to these researchers, so they kind of
dulled that reaction. But by you know, a quick emotional
response to pain, like you feel it in your emotional
part of your brain and then you have a very
quick emotional response to it, it helps you get over
it better. Apparently, what we're really going to need to
come to. In addition to pain and colors are better
(11:01):
ways to cope with pain now when it comes to
dealing with um, more chronic pain like osteo arthritis, doctors
have found that that limbic response, more emotionally charged response
that women have to pain can be helpful for men
because in comparing the ways that women and men processed
UH the osteous rights pain, they found that women who
(11:22):
were able to to talk about the pain, to journal
it out to, you know, express it to other people,
dealt with it better than men who were more likely
to just kind of bottle it up, I guess. And
that study they showed that the only people who knew
that the men were in pain were their wives. So
and it wasn't because they said, hey, honey, I'm in pains,
(11:44):
because they knew enough about the man to say, oh,
he's in pain. Yeah, they were able to see their
behavioral cues. So it's almost like by talking about it more,
you do better by having that very emotional talking response,
which again it's not I don't know, it's not like
you want a friend who's always talking about how in
pain she is. Well, moll, I'm a black kurts again.
But maybe by talking about it over and over to
(12:05):
a friend, you might have a friend who eventually says, hey,
go to the doctor. Yeah, because it could be a
case when a lot of these studies where women are
experiencing chronic pain but they're just kind of dealing with
it and trying to work through it, but they're not
going to the doctor, which is where it becomes really problematic.
But going back to that U c l A study
the lead researcher made emphasize the fact that even though
(12:28):
men and women do seem to have this ingrained difference
in in pain response, they are complementary. You know, it's
not that doesn't necessarily mean that the fact that our
limbic system is lighting up while men's cognitive systems are
lighting up is necessarily more advantageous than the other. It's
supposed to work together, which makes sense because you want
a healthy species overall. But you know, you you mentioned
(12:52):
earlier the study where there were no differences between men
and women's pain in a really chronic condition like cancer, well,
extreme pain, extreme physically, but they were saying the reason
why it all comes down again to how you cope
with the pain, Because what they do is they divided
these people into groups of how well they dealt with
the pain. Whether there are people who were just you know,
(13:12):
living with it and feeling miserable, and then people who
were living with it and just charging forward with their
life and not letying the pain hamper them. And it
all is out to the emotional networks they had around them,
if they felt supported, if they felt like they had
people they could talk to. Um. So again it's it's
more about talking about pain and finding a way to
deal with it as opposed to just living with it
(13:32):
and feeling miserable for no reason. So, even though it
might seem like an uncomfortable proposition to say that men
and women do experience pain differently on a very biological level,
it's going to benefit us if doctors do look more
into this, because they can develop pain killers that will
buill our pain better. And also, some people are advocating
(13:53):
for gender specific scales of pain. So if you go
into if you're a woman who goes in and sees
a male doctor and he says, on a scale, want
to tend what's your pain? Um, if she says like
a six, he should be able to judge what that
is on sort of a female spectrum as opposed to
what a six would be for a male. Yeah, because
this reminds me too of something that came up when
we were talking about antidepressants one time, about how they've
(14:15):
been trying to broaden clinical trials with antidepressants to include
more women because they used to just exclude us because
they would say, oh, well, their hormones are gonna mess
with everything. But they're thinking that estrogen levels are very
correlated to the way we feel pain. So you know,
we obviously need to have you know, more women involved
(14:36):
um in all of these medical developments. And I'm glad
you brought up estrogen, Kristen, because that was one thing
we skipped over before we talked about coping, was maybe
the role hormones play and how we perceive pain. And
one of the largest groups of people who complain of
pain UH is women over the age of forty five,
and they are more likely to complain of low back pain,
(14:59):
migraine pains, and joint pain including arthritis. And the thinking
is is that these women might be menopausal and with
the loss of estrogen, that's why they might feel the pain.
It may just be aged and maybe you just have
more pain as you age. But some researchers have theorized
the estrogen is protective and that when estrogen levels are high,
the brain's natural pain killer system responds more potently when
(15:21):
a painful experience occurs, and when it's low, low pain
killer response. But you know, the thing about all of
this we should have said this up front, is that
my pain is probably different than your pain. Pain is
so subjective that it's really hard for us to make
some sort of analytic argument out of all of this,
but it is interesting to note that in our brains
(15:41):
there are different ways, the different circuits for the way
things things happen. But only I do think it's interesting
to answer our our reader's question, do men and women
feel pain differently? The answer is yes, yes, And if
you want to up that pain tolerance, have a baby. Yeah,
that's not the takeaway, and no jokes jokes where we
(16:04):
get a flood of angry listener mail. A finger pain
tolerance is not a good reason to have a child.
Babies aren't a pain killers. Oh there's so many directions
that could go, but that's a topic for another podcast.
Before we get into that, Kristen, should we answer some
listener mail? Yes we should, Okay, so our first a
(16:24):
listener emails from Kristen, who wrote about the episode why
are women so attracted to the vampires? And she had
a promise some of our character descriptions um, and as
we said, we're not really vampire experts. But she thinks
we really missed the mark by only looking at feminist perspectives.
She writes, first, and I'd like to point out that
I'm not a crazy Twilight fan. Bellis want isn't as
(16:46):
vacuous a character as you made her out to be.
In fact, she comes from a long line of female
protagonists who feel lost and lonely and are essentially outsiders
who somehow managed to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. When
I read the books, I was struck with the similarities
between Bella and some of these other characters, most notably
Meg Murray from our Rinkland Time Justice Mag's told to
embrace and use her faults, Bella too, eventually finds that
(17:07):
her own deficiency is exactly what is needed to save
her loved ones. In a very large part, I feel
that the attraction of these books is less about the
vampires than about the fact the Bella really is sort
of an every girl that most of us can identify with,
having been here at some point or another and having
longed for something, anything, to come along and make us
feel special. Thank you, Christen. That's Christian with Okay, not
Christian with the Sea. Like. Yeah, I didn't email mom
(17:29):
stuff at helst works dot com with my opinion on Twilight, um,
but we do have Zoe who did emails email us
about her opinion on Twilight. She says, I'm in Grade ten.
A large group of my friends are absolutely crazy about
the Twilight books, and personally I'm not quite a fan,
but they could be. They would be more entertaining if
they were better written, she says. After you get past
the two pages of how utterly divine and godlike Edward
(17:52):
is and how much Bella swims at the thought of
his chiseled cheekbones and glittery six pack, the plut is
actually quite entertaining and cute to read. I hadn't really
thought about it before, but Edward is really a creepy
sort of boyfriend, very possessive. I don't know about you, guys,
but the whole watching you while you sleep business isn't
really something I've ever wanted to deal with, especially if
it's by someone who's broken into your house and likes
(18:14):
how inviting you smell. Very good point and Zoe creepy. Indeed,
she says, she refuses to read the last book, no
matter how many times her friends try to force her to. Again,
she doesn't really care for getting into Bella's over obsessive
mind again, regardless of what Stephanie Meyer is trying what.
Regardless of whether Steph mcmyer is trying to make her relatable,
(18:34):
her passiveness really bothers me. I would much rather a
heroine who isn't very much like me and has opinions
and quirks and faults, rather than a rag doll character
who doesn't do anything for herself. All right, So there's
our two opinions on Bella Swan, the pro and the
con camp. What do you guys think? Email us some
stuff at how stuff works dot com and if you
(18:55):
want to check out our blog during the week, it's
called how to Stuff. And if you want to check
out that article that Molly mentioned earlier in the podcasts,
are do Redheads Need more Anesthesia? I believe? Is the title?
You can find it at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
(19:16):
at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom? Never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen Christ and I'm sad today.
(00:21):
Oh Holly, where are you said? So we're talking about pain. Yeah,
it's kind of a downer. I'll try and put a
band aid on it. We'll put a banded on it. Uh,
knowing that we are going to learn things about pain
differences among men and women. That's interesting, Molly, and it
was interesting, but it was sad to research and all.
The whole reason we started researching pain is because we
(00:44):
had an email from a listener, which we love, and
it asked us whether men and women feel pain any differently,
and she cited childbirth. That's sort of what we think
of as like an epitome of painful experiences. So some
women say it's very pleasurable. I don't know if I
trust them. Yeah, you been if there's some cultural idea
that men just keep a stiff upper lip whereas girls
(01:04):
are just gonna boo who over a skin knee? Our
ultimate comeback is you're not pushing a baby out any
time during your life, So is childbirth in some way?
This is it really like the epitome of pain. If
we survive it, can we survive anything? And I did
find one really interesting study that suggests that, yes, childbirth
can increase your pain tolerance. Yeah, they compared the pain
(01:27):
threshold among women who had had children and women who
hadn't had children, and they did indeed find that Paris
woman who had experienced childbirth had a higher pain threshold
than the other women. So now that I think that's
really interesting because the rest of the stities we're going
to talk about didn't differentiate as far as I know,
(01:49):
between women who had given birth and women who hadn't.
Because this one study we found suggests that, yes, if
you give birth, then nothing will compare to that pain,
and obviously all pains are minimized as a result. But
every other show we're gonna site is gonna be pretty
depressing because it's going to suggest that women feel pain
more intensely and more often than men. And this is
a pretty recent finding. And the way that these studies
(02:13):
and the articles reporting on them were phrased, it seemed
like people were very hesitant to say, yes, there are
differences between the way men and women feel pain, and
women on the whole report feeling more pain than men,
because it does seem like a very antiquated knee jerk
reaction that implies that women are the weaker sex. But
(02:37):
as in a lot of these podcasts Molly, that we
do when we compare different things between the genders, it's
not so much an argument of better or worse, but
simply different. It's different, and it's important because obviously, if
you need a pain killer, you want something that will
work for you. And knowing that men and women not
only feel pain differently, but more intensely for some things
(02:58):
than for others, so that you can really tailor a
treatment to fit either gender better. So let's walk through
just a couple of these um certain conditions that really
affect women more than men, and this comes from the
Pain Consortium from the National Institutes of Health, and the
number one issue that really affects women nine times more
(03:20):
than men is fibromyalgia, right, which is basically just pain.
You have chronic, widespread pain all over the body, tenderness, soreness,
flue like aches, fatigue, headaches, stiffness UM and they don't
know a lot about it, but they have some evidence
that maybe UM in the brain, just the areas related
to pain perception work much differently than people who suffer
(03:41):
from fibro mayalgia. And then we have migraines. This is
something that you and I have podcasted before, because one
in five women experience migraines, whereas only one in seventeen
men experienced them, and doctors think that it might have
something to do with shifts in hormone levels, because migraines
for women often occur around obviously Asian menstruation and during pregnancy.
(04:02):
Another one is ostio arthritis. Women report more as arthritic
pain and severe pain, and also heart disease. Women in
their pre menopossal years experienced chest pain more often than men.
But there is one important difference, and we'll come back
to this a little more later on, but when it
comes to long term extreme pain, specifically things like bone cancer,
(04:27):
there is no gender difference between the amount of pain reported.
Men and women feel it exactly the pain exactly the
same way. It seems like it's a lot more to
do with acute pain and um more low level chronic
pain as opposed to long standing extreme So we we
(04:47):
brought up the difference that girls, you know, cry when
they get a skin me, whereas men are expected to
keep a stiff upper lip. So one of the first
things that these researchers did when they want to figure
out if men and women do feel pain differently is
to find out if it's all just social motivation. Yeah, basically,
did the men want to appear more macho by reporting
less pain than is actually going on. So what they
(05:10):
did was they gave women more money to participate in
a pain sete than they gave men. And first of all,
I have to say that every single pain study pretty
much is based on sticking your hand and ice water,
So maybe just women are smart enough not to do
this study. Yeah, they wanted to see how long women
or men and women would hold their hand in a
bucket of swirling ice water. And some people were offered
(05:33):
a dollar to keep their hand and I mean this
water is near freezing to keep their hand in there
for five minutes, and somewhere giving offered twenty dollars. Yeah,
so even the women who had the motivation of getting
more money, the longer they kept their hand in just
gave up, whereas men, you know, they thought men who
you know, it wasn't about society, was just about money,
would not really care as much. Men who were offered
(05:56):
more money did even better. So it suggests, you know,
it kind of disprove this whole social motivation theory because
they were at starting point and then they added the
money motivation. They did above and beyond. So whereas women,
even with the money motivation, we're just like, I still
feel the pain. Yeah, And and so they think that
there must be some kind of biological explanation for why
(06:21):
men and women experience pain differently, and research has shown
that that is exactly the case. Are different circuits in
our our bodies and brains do process pain differently. So
I want to talk about Jeanes first, Kristen, Yes, well,
let's talk about genes now, going back to childbirth, okay,
(06:44):
Gynecologists already know that women prefer certain kinds of pain
killers to other mothers and childbirth, for instance, prefer something
called now be feed as opposed to morphine. But men,
on the other hand, they love the morphine. Men prefer
the morphine. It seems to have more of a pain
relieving effect on them than the now beefine, and they
(07:07):
think that this has to do with pain opioid receptors,
which dull pain in the brain. Right, each of those
drugs binds two different receptors, and the women that now
buffine acts on cappa receptors, which are far less studied
than Mu receptors, which is what morphine binds too. And
they found that when they give a man a drug
(07:28):
that like nor buffine now buffine sorry, binds to the
cappa receptors, they don't get any pain relief at all.
In fact, sometimes they get they get more pain as
a result. So the thing that dampens pain in women's
brains doesn't dampen pain in a man's brain. And they've
even traces down to the genetic level. A doctor has
(07:49):
actually identified the first gene known to be involved in
modulating pain thresholds in women, because variations in that gene
do not do anything to a man's response on pain,
whereas if you have a variation of that gene as
a woman, you feel more pain of a lower pain threshold.
And interestingly, this gene is also related to hair and
(08:09):
skin color. So we have an article on our site
how stuff works dot Com called do redheads need more anesthesia?
And the thinking is yes, because they have such a
variation of this gene, they have a much lower pain threshold.
So we have something on the on the genetic, on
the neurological level, things that are already happening differently um
(08:30):
in our brains to process pain right and to relieve pain. Now,
let's say I stubbed my elbow on a on a
table and a male steps elbow on the table. Scientists
have figured out that just different areas of our brain
are lighting up at the very first sign of pain.
Forget the pain killer part, but just when we both
feel that pain, the man is going to feel something
in his analytic or cognitive centers, whereas when I feel
(08:53):
that pain, my emotion based limbic regions light up, oh, emotions, emotions.
And this is based on U c L A study
UM that was the tract of the PET scans pet
brain scans of patient steering mild pain stimuli, and it
was the study pool was pretty small. It was only
twenty six women and twenty four men who were experiencing
(09:13):
irritable bowel syndrome. But nevertheless, this is the largest study
to date of its kind. Now, what they did was
they felt when they found out that the different areas
of the brain lit up, they went back to evolution,
which I can't say I totally agree with. Evolutionary biology
is tricky. It is tricky. So they're saying that the
reason that a man's um cognitive centers are going to
(09:36):
light up is because the early male role was defending
the homestead. So in response to stress or pain, he's
going to be very quickly analyzing his fight or flight,
you know options. He's got to say, how am I
going to protect my homestead. I'm not going to think
about this pain an emotional way, whereas that's what they
say the women are doing because they've got to protect
not necessarily the homestead, but their child. So it has
(09:57):
the very emotional reaction to oh, must protect this child. Yeah,
the more the more nurturing response. And so I say
that evolutionary biology can be tricky because it does always
seem to go back to this like idea that you know,
men are hunters and gathers. Women are just here to
produce children and take care of the home, which does
get tiresome at times. I'm not going to moresome, but
(10:18):
I guess knowing that is a really good way to
cope with it, because um, there was the study recently
about how swearing can relieve pain, and they found that
swearing relieves pain more efficiently in women than in men
because when you swear, it's your limbic region. So by
letting loose like that quick emotional outburst to pain, um,
(10:40):
they alleviated the pain more quickly. Now, men swear all
the time, according to these researchers, so they kind of
dulled that reaction. But by you know, a quick emotional
response to pain, like you feel it in your emotional
part of your brain and then you have a very
quick emotional response to it, it helps you get over
it better. Apparently, what we're really going to need to
come to. In addition to pain and colors are better
(11:01):
ways to cope with pain now when it comes to
dealing with um, more chronic pain like osteo arthritis, doctors
have found that that limbic response, more emotionally charged response
that women have to pain can be helpful for men
because in comparing the ways that women and men processed
UH the osteous rights pain, they found that women who
(11:22):
were able to to talk about the pain, to journal
it out to, you know, express it to other people,
dealt with it better than men who were more likely
to just kind of bottle it up, I guess. And
that study they showed that the only people who knew
that the men were in pain were their wives. So
and it wasn't because they said, hey, honey, I'm in pains,
(11:44):
because they knew enough about the man to say, oh,
he's in pain. Yeah, they were able to see their
behavioral cues. So it's almost like by talking about it more,
you do better by having that very emotional talking response,
which again it's not I don't know, it's not like
you want a friend who's always talking about how in
pain she is. Well, moll, I'm a black kurts again.
But maybe by talking about it over and over to
(12:05):
a friend, you might have a friend who eventually says, hey,
go to the doctor. Yeah, because it could be a
case when a lot of these studies where women are
experiencing chronic pain but they're just kind of dealing with
it and trying to work through it, but they're not
going to the doctor, which is where it becomes really problematic.
But going back to that U c l A study
the lead researcher made emphasize the fact that even though
(12:28):
men and women do seem to have this ingrained difference
in in pain response, they are complementary. You know, it's
not that doesn't necessarily mean that the fact that our
limbic system is lighting up while men's cognitive systems are
lighting up is necessarily more advantageous than the other. It's
supposed to work together, which makes sense because you want
a healthy species overall. But you know, you you mentioned
(12:52):
earlier the study where there were no differences between men
and women's pain in a really chronic condition like cancer, well,
extreme pain, extreme physically, but they were saying the reason
why it all comes down again to how you cope
with the pain, Because what they do is they divided
these people into groups of how well they dealt with
the pain. Whether there are people who were just you know,
(13:12):
living with it and feeling miserable, and then people who
were living with it and just charging forward with their
life and not letying the pain hamper them. And it
all is out to the emotional networks they had around them,
if they felt supported, if they felt like they had
people they could talk to. Um. So again it's it's
more about talking about pain and finding a way to
deal with it as opposed to just living with it
(13:32):
and feeling miserable for no reason. So, even though it
might seem like an uncomfortable proposition to say that men
and women do experience pain differently on a very biological level,
it's going to benefit us if doctors do look more
into this, because they can develop pain killers that will
buill our pain better. And also, some people are advocating
(13:53):
for gender specific scales of pain. So if you go
into if you're a woman who goes in and sees
a male doctor and he says, on a scale, want
to tend what's your pain? Um, if she says like
a six, he should be able to judge what that
is on sort of a female spectrum as opposed to
what a six would be for a male. Yeah, because
this reminds me too of something that came up when
we were talking about antidepressants one time, about how they've
(14:15):
been trying to broaden clinical trials with antidepressants to include
more women because they used to just exclude us because
they would say, oh, well, their hormones are gonna mess
with everything. But they're thinking that estrogen levels are very
correlated to the way we feel pain. So you know,
we obviously need to have you know, more women involved
(14:36):
um in all of these medical developments. And I'm glad
you brought up estrogen, Kristen, because that was one thing
we skipped over before we talked about coping, was maybe
the role hormones play and how we perceive pain. And
one of the largest groups of people who complain of
pain UH is women over the age of forty five,
and they are more likely to complain of low back pain,
(14:59):
migraine pains, and joint pain including arthritis. And the thinking
is is that these women might be menopausal and with
the loss of estrogen, that's why they might feel the pain.
It may just be aged and maybe you just have
more pain as you age. But some researchers have theorized
the estrogen is protective and that when estrogen levels are high,
the brain's natural pain killer system responds more potently when
(15:21):
a painful experience occurs, and when it's low, low pain
killer response. But you know, the thing about all of
this we should have said this up front, is that
my pain is probably different than your pain. Pain is
so subjective that it's really hard for us to make
some sort of analytic argument out of all of this,
but it is interesting to note that in our brains
(15:41):
there are different ways, the different circuits for the way
things things happen. But only I do think it's interesting
to answer our our reader's question, do men and women
feel pain differently? The answer is yes, yes, And if
you want to up that pain tolerance, have a baby. Yeah,
that's not the takeaway, and no jokes jokes where we
(16:04):
get a flood of angry listener mail. A finger pain
tolerance is not a good reason to have a child.
Babies aren't a pain killers. Oh there's so many directions
that could go, but that's a topic for another podcast.
Before we get into that, Kristen, should we answer some
listener mail? Yes we should, Okay, so our first a
(16:24):
listener emails from Kristen, who wrote about the episode why
are women so attracted to the vampires? And she had
a promise some of our character descriptions um, and as
we said, we're not really vampire experts. But she thinks
we really missed the mark by only looking at feminist perspectives.
She writes, first, and I'd like to point out that
I'm not a crazy Twilight fan. Bellis want isn't as
(16:46):
vacuous a character as you made her out to be.
In fact, she comes from a long line of female
protagonists who feel lost and lonely and are essentially outsiders
who somehow managed to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. When
I read the books, I was struck with the similarities
between Bella and some of these other characters, most notably
Meg Murray from our Rinkland Time Justice Mag's told to
embrace and use her faults, Bella too, eventually finds that
(17:07):
her own deficiency is exactly what is needed to save
her loved ones. In a very large part, I feel
that the attraction of these books is less about the
vampires than about the fact the Bella really is sort
of an every girl that most of us can identify with,
having been here at some point or another and having
longed for something, anything, to come along and make us
feel special. Thank you, Christen. That's Christian with Okay, not
Christian with the Sea. Like. Yeah, I didn't email mom
(17:29):
stuff at helst works dot com with my opinion on Twilight, um,
but we do have Zoe who did emails email us
about her opinion on Twilight. She says, I'm in Grade ten.
A large group of my friends are absolutely crazy about
the Twilight books, and personally I'm not quite a fan,
but they could be. They would be more entertaining if
they were better written, she says. After you get past
the two pages of how utterly divine and godlike Edward
(17:52):
is and how much Bella swims at the thought of
his chiseled cheekbones and glittery six pack, the plut is
actually quite entertaining and cute to read. I hadn't really
thought about it before, but Edward is really a creepy
sort of boyfriend, very possessive. I don't know about you, guys,
but the whole watching you while you sleep business isn't
really something I've ever wanted to deal with, especially if
it's by someone who's broken into your house and likes
(18:14):
how inviting you smell. Very good point and Zoe creepy. Indeed,
she says, she refuses to read the last book, no
matter how many times her friends try to force her to. Again,
she doesn't really care for getting into Bella's over obsessive
mind again, regardless of what Stephanie Meyer is trying what.
Regardless of whether Steph mcmyer is trying to make her relatable,
(18:34):
her passiveness really bothers me. I would much rather a
heroine who isn't very much like me and has opinions
and quirks and faults, rather than a rag doll character
who doesn't do anything for herself. All right, So there's
our two opinions on Bella Swan, the pro and the
con camp. What do you guys think? Email us some
stuff at how stuff works dot com and if you
(18:55):
want to check out our blog during the week, it's
called how to Stuff. And if you want to check
out that article that Molly mentioned earlier in the podcasts,
are do Redheads Need more Anesthesia? I believe? Is the title?
You can find it at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
(19:16):
at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
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