Future research is needed to find out the exact causes of pain perception differences, and which ones would be best to target for more effective pain control, Fillingim said.
Finding biological markers for pain, such as genes or proteins, would also help take some of the subjectivity out of assessing the experience of pain, Liu said, but the identification of such markers is likely a long way off.
Pass it on: Across many different diseases, women say they experience more pain than men.
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31 Comments
Add CommentI believe that men do not want to show pain as much as women, and that it becomes almost unconscious. But I also believe that women experience more pain because they want care from men (also probably mostly unconscious).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHans Hans Hans... I do not disagree with your comment about a man not wanting to show pain as much; I would guess it to be more about ego than an unconscious act. However, do you think it could be possible the physical structure of a man-vs-woman could have something to do with it rather than sympathy pain as you suggest? Most women I know will absorb as much pain as possible before complaining.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs they study this further I would also wonder how much of pain response is due to mental training... as children "most boys" are taught to accept pain as an avenue to "manhood" as silly as that may seem. Young athletes are always encouraged to "play through the pain" or "no pain no gain"....
I would rather believe boys/men are mentally trained to accept pain rather than women are looking for sympathy...
The 'purpose' of pain may be seen as a signal to prevent or minimize further damage to the body. (Message to brain: My hand is in the fire, please remove from fire ASAP.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt may be that it is more important to prevent damage to women's bodies, hence the stronger / clearer signal their brains receive. Possibly the greater 'expendability' of men from a reproductive point of view could explain this.
Having recently been in the hospital I think Hans is right that men are often conciously or unconciously macho when asked how much pain they feel by a typically female nurse. Would be interesting to break down the numbers by the gender of the person asking the question.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's both, women are coddled in America compared to other countries, and men are expected to live happily through any level of suffering.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf men were expendable reproductively, humans wouldn't exhibit such large sexual dimorphism which favors the male's physical strength.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is very interesting, and it will be fascinating to follow the future research!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy naive hypotheses are that it may very well be founded in both biological and cultural factors.
And I believe it is (as often), wise to fall back on evolution, and value pains function relative what we do know about other differences about the sexes.
And to take into account that males appear to have lived much more violent lives (at least during the last 10 000y of recorded history where we have better evidence).
The male life, and possible success in evolutionary terms, have perhaps been more dependent on the ability to withstand more pain, then in the female life.
The ability to go on fighting while wounded, to don't hold back due to fear of pain, and go on hunting while ill e.g.
While for a female in a small family group it has been more valuable in evolutionary terms, to really rest and slow down when experience pain.
And if there are even a slight differences in evolutionary success (which there might very well be), dependent on the level and intensity of pain experienced, it will over time get build into our biology.
And again, that this appears to be such a general feature of human culture spanning the globe and type of society, also strongly implies a underlying biological factor.
A biological underpinning that can in turn be reinforced or moderated by culture, as we see in so so many better documented issues.
Men are indeed the stronger sex. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I get hurt, I usually laugh about it. My wife, on the other hand screams and do not see the fun on it...
But, alas, we have to be politically correct, so in order to make everyone happy, those pseudo-scientists come up with idea to emasculate men, to make men look like wimps.
This may not be a popular interpretation with the ladies- but alternatively, what this study really shows is that women complain more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was looking for some kind of control to determine if some women maybe over-reporting/exaggerating their pain. It's hard to find anything very solid since, as the article stated, pain is perceptual. I googled "do women complain more than men," because I thought surely there must have been some past study on this hot-button issue. In hindsight, I guess I was introducing a little bias into my already non-very-scientific research. I should have googled something like "men women complain." Anyway, I found this: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/830026-official-sick-men-do-complain-more. It turns out men might be the bigger complainers. I don't know how scientific the study is, or if it is peer-reviewed, but maybe worth noting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@NatureTM
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEh that article is when a guy get's sick. That's a different between getting punched in the face and getting sick from a virus
Anyways I play a lot of sports and my peers are guys so I'm trained to ignore pain when it happens. I sprained my ankle in football and soccer but I kept running until the practice was over instead of sitting out and recovering. Yeah it didn't help with the sprain but it's how things are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article hypothesizes that women feel more pain then men. The reader comments, however, lead one to assume that women are superior to men. 1. Women feel more pain. 2. Thus they take better care of their bodies and do not expect too much from them. 3. Women live longer then men by avoiding pain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is it that so many men assume that an article like this means that women complain about nothing while men tough it out ? The point is that womens nerve endings are sending more pain messages to their brains and that womens brains interpret these pain messages as "pain". It is not about "will power" or self control. Because, let's face it... if we want to assume that men are controlling pain through "will power" then we also need to assume that they are doing something stupid through this practice that results in them dying younger.
Take your pick.
You don't specify which comments you use to draw your inferences, but let me try and comment on some of your thougts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEspecially point 2 and 3 in your list.
"...Women feel more pain. 2. Thus they take better care of their bodies and do not expect too much from them."
"3. Women live longer then men by avoiding pain."
And then you state,
"The point is that women's nerve endings are sending more pain messages to their brains and that women's brains interpret these pain messages as "pain"
Which is what point 2 and 3 would imply. This would also very much be in line with something that we could expect to find to be the consequences of evolution on our biology! (If this do indeed be the case).
You continue,
"...then we also need to assume that they are doing something stupid through this practice that results in them dying younger."
Which again, is precisely what we DO appear to find historically concerning men and boys. We do more stupid things, die younger, take greater chances and bigger risks, especially in our teens.
Another interesting thing would be if there are differences in perceived pain due to different causes between males / females?
Headline: Subjective Study of Subjective Data Results in Fundamentally Subjective Report
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is needed here is a non-subjective means of measuring pain response intensity. The article states that such methods are "likely a long way off", but it seems to me that we could do it today with 3 things: (1) an fMRI machine, (2) a controllable source of pain (like a mild electric shock) and (3) a group of volunteers. Just stick the volunteers' heads in the fMRI, apply the shock to their feet or legs (same intesity for everybody) and see whose brains light up the most.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs someone who is A) Female, B) suffers from a form of arthritis (psoriatic) that developed at an early age and C) also suffer from migraines, I can state that I don't start complaining about the pain till I am at a level 5 or above. My husband also has suffers from Migraines, and what knocks him out for the whole day, will make me just take a lot of pills and continue on with my day, because I feel like I can't lay around and need to work. That I think is society making me continue to nag at me to work when I really want to be laying in bed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA speculative non piece of science. Fluff.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDifficult to quantify. First off, different people find different types of pain more or less stressful. 2nd, social ideas regarding pain wrt men and women. 3rd, I don't recall anyone figuring out how and where within the brain pain is 'registered', so how can one measure how much neural pain activity a test subject is under?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"pain" and "perception" = not the same....signal to brain strong or weak m vs f ? when same the report of pain differs ...f = blah blah blah, m = gut it out, say little or nothing....f likely more accurate scaling pain 1 - 10 hi,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thism = likely to understate perceived pain, e.g. an 8 reported as a 4, etc, whereas f = reports an 8 as an 8
I would guess, that the man who sat down and whined over a minor injury, when the injury was inflicted by a cave bear, had a very short (future)life expancy, while the woman diiging roots, grubs etc, whining at a similar injury, might increase her life expectancy by taking care of the injury, avoiding later infections etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, I rather agree with d3mocritus, it is an evolutionary advantage for both sexes to have different pain thresholds.
In my country, Denmark, women visit the doctor 14 times/year, men 9 times/year, women live some 5 years longer than men.
Men don't fight enough cave bears any more, at least it does nothing for male chances of survival ;-)
Whether women feel pain more "intensely" than men or not, I would have to agree with those who believe that the ability to absorb pain and shrug it off, even laugh at it, is a male 'thing' which seems to have to do more with the way men are raised than probably anything else.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo "take it like a man" is to accept, embrace and even welcome pain as something natural and ordinary in the total scheme of things. Even the sportsmen like e.g. boxing and football are painful and would in all likelihood be more so if the salaries were not so great.
To accept and embrace physical discomfort as the path to manhood is not silly at all. Dobzhansky was right; nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. We men are the hunters and fighters, and until recently the hunting and fighting was up close and personal. If you were slightly wounded you couldn't cry to your mamma because she wasn't there, and the shamans/medics/whatever were occupied with men worse off than you. So you managed as best you could.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMale stoicism is not a virtue in all cultures, but it is in most, and cultures that reward it tend to survive at the expense of those that allow men to be soft. Culture then reinforces biology; boys learn quickly that whining and kvetching will not be tolerated, while girls learn just as quickly that it will be. We find this in Germanic (including Anglo-Saxon) cultures, many Native American tribes, and in Sabras. So Nature goes and assigns the painful task of childbirth to women.
Life is a bundle of contradictions. . . .
"Dobzhansky was right; nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWas not aware of this quote, thank you!
"So Nature goes and assigns the painful task of childbirth to women."
One thing that springs to mind relating to childbirth, is the temporal difference between the event causing the child, and the childbirth itself.
And nature has made sure that "event" is pleasurable enough... ;)
And evolution is working on those aspect that are in any way favourable in evolutionary terms.
So it might be that the possible evolutionary gain of experience more/higher intensity pain in everyday regular life, has the cause that women go through more pain during childbirth.
It might also be that childbirth is so painful in itself, that a little more or less does not have an evolutionary impact on weather to do it again at all...
"Men don't fight enough cave bears any more, at least it does nothing for male chances of survival ;-)"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo we don't, and it does not, sadly enough. AND we are totally misunderstood when when we do whine because we want (well deserved) recognition of our stoicism and bravery in front of the enemy ;)
I think Diesel67 quote of Dobzhansky, is spot on, and something we should always bear with us...
Fact: experiments show that when given mild pain, women felt it worse than men, but when given severe pain, women withstood it better. Statistical interaction, that is. Makes sense that women, who have to be the ones to give birth, can withstand severe pain better. Else they might give up having babies - not good for the species. It might show some promise to discover whether women are more sensitive. I personally am 'blessed' with a very high sedation threshold (takes a lot to lower my pain) but a very low pain threshold. I am a supersensitive person and more women might be that way than me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPure socialization, as David N'Gog brings to attention. Swap the variables to obtain identical results the opposite way around, concluding zilch as to pain reporting mechanisms & other. Think about pain in terms of survival. Remember being a kid pulling your hand away from the hot stove element before the pain signals reach the conscious part of your mind, pulling your hand away from danger so fast there was insufficient time for decision and there was insufficient time for evaluation. What protects hands in such moments is totally unrelated to gender & socialization and has everything to do with who keeps hands.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurther study needs to control for women's rating the pain on a different scale than men, women over-reporting (as opposed to over-experiencing) pain, men under-reporting pain, and last, there needs to be a significant enough spread across a variety of pain conditions. It's not enough to measure pain only due to serious illness or injury.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSelf-reporting itself is well-known to be unreliable. A more reliable measure is a biological one.
Although it's clear from the commenting that rampant, thoughtless sexism is alive and well even in supposedly scientifically-minded circles. This study does not even remotely support anyone's sexist generalizations.
The experiments I quoted in an earlier comment were based on actually creating pain in the men and women and increasing it until the subject said stop. So this has nothing to do with socialization,expectations, women or men complaining more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt simply was a test of pain tolerance and men did worse at the higher levels than women. So there!
Apparently Redheads are more sensitive to pain and experience problems with anaesthetics in either sex
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving watched my wife give birth I can honestly say that women handle intense pain better than men. Any man that disagrees needs to have a grapefruit shoved out his penis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this