Well I assume women feel more pain in general considering they have periods which are accompanied by pain and other unpleasant sensations. It’s probably one of the reasons women have on average higher pain tolerance than men.
Women have lower pain tolerances though, with the exception of when they are in labor (due to very elevated hormone levels)
One, source? Two, wouldn’t a lower pain tolerance only illustrate the point women experience more pain? If women’s pain tolerance is lower that means the pain we experience is worse/more… so either way really… women experience more pain in general.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3690315/ - postoperative for the same procedures, women rate their pain as higher. I would interpret that to mean they have lower pain tolerance, although as the article acknowledges, its tricky to measure.
Well, sure, I agree, it is probably why women experience more pain, as opposed to they have more painful diseases/injuries.
Recent experiences would make me believe the pain tolerance is not higher in labor.
https://sarahbuckley.com/pain-in-labour-your-hormones-are-your-helpers-2/
Certainly not trying to say labor isnt painful though!
Self-reported study
We don’t have sensors that can detect pain like we can detect heart rate or anything, so yeah it’s going to be self-reported
And sometimes “the best possible” still isn’t enough to support any kind of conclusion.
Which means the only thing the study concludes is that women report feeling pain more often than men.
Which is fine, it just doesn’t have anything to do with who feels more pain, but more studies on the culture around pain reporting between the genders around more objective markers could lead to very useful information
Yeah and headlines like this come out, then suddenly when I (as a man) mention having chronic pain, people will hit me with the “but studies say that women feel more pain than men!”
Yeah, well that doesn’t make my pain go away. But I suppose that’s just a non-falsifiable anecdote, so the proper academic perspective is that my subjective experience of pain is empirically unsound.
How that differs in any way from the study participants’ experience of pain is anybody’s guess, but I suppose it’s easier to get research funding if you make your study sound feminist so…
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Right but isn’t this susceptible to the “is my green your green” qualia problem? The proper conclusion should be that women experience more pain OR are more likely to report their pain as higher. I feel like the former is more likely but how could you tell?
Well, yeah: Women use T cells to communicate pain through the neuro-immune pathways while men use microglia-to-BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor). The women’s version of pain completely bypasses all of that, jumping straight to pro-inflammatory cytokines that increase sensitivity.
Unless the woman is pregnant. Then she’ll use the same exact pain pathways as men. Presumably, to make the pain of childbirth not-as-bad.
Can you provide a source for this? I’m not a bio expert but this seems not right to me. I would love to be proven wrong and learn more though.
Oh geeze, I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m writing a novel about a PhD-level biologist (who becomes a shapeshifter) and ended up doing loads of research about biology… stuff in order to make the way he modifies people a bit more believable (so many stories are so full of hand waving these days it drives me nuts!).
One of the things I ended up researching was sexual dimorphism in various species including humans and wow what a rabbit hole that is! I have in my notes all sorts of things (differences) that most people have no clue about:
- Women have different livers. Specifically, estrogen/testosterone turns on/off epigenetic pathways that make their livers behave a bit differently. So if a woman receives a liver transplant from a man or vice versa, it’ll be a while before it starts behaving “on brand” haha.
- Women’s hearts are bigger/stronger/thicker but most people know that (necessary for pumping blood for more than one!)
- Women’s internal organs can move around a lot more than men’s. They’re not fixed in place like with men. Along these lines, women’s tailbones can move a little bit (men’s might as well be hard stone). This was important research because my shapeshifter character gets requests to give people tails and I needed to know if that was even possible and, come to find out, much simpler to give women tails than men! Haha
- The tendency for women’s brains to form more cross-hemisphere connections VS men’s tendency to form front-to-back connections is actually a very funny part of the story (it’s a comedy). Anyone that reads that part (and doesn’t understand what it means yet) is going to be thinking, “holy shit that makes so much sense!” Hahaha
- Women can perceive textures men cannot. The reasons why aren’t complicated: Thinner skin, smaller fingers means greater nerve density and sensitivity. This was the research that had me looking into nerve pathways and why women are just generally more sensitive than men. Besides what I already mentioned, women store fat completely differently than men. Essentially, men and women have completely different flesh. Men cross-link fat cells making them much more “solid” whereas women stack their fat cells on top of each other like little pillows… This is why they’re softer than men.
- Now combine the flesh knowledge with the T-cell nervous response and the fact that stacked fat cells (and the vasculature that goes with that) together and you end up with this: Women bruise much easier than men. Bruising results in a cytokine (swelling) response… Which amplifies pain in the affected region. Having more lifelong exposure to cytokine in various joints that are constantly being used/bumped, it makes sense to me that women would be more susceptible to inflammation-related pain disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis. Which impacts women at two to three times the rate of men!
Hopefully that explains what I think I understand about the differences that lead up to women experiencing pain differently/more intensely.
…and that’s just scratching the surface of all the differences! People think men and women “are basically the same, just with a few physical differences” but it’s more like this: Men and women experience the world completely differently from each other.
Women physically see things differently than men (they see colors in greater resolution), they feel the world differently from men, and they have 50% more olfactory bulb neurons than men which means they have much more sensitive noses (especially to certain compounds like sulfur and scents like lavender have a vastly enhanced effect!).
Women live in a different world than men. We need to stop pretending we’re the same and start accounting for it in medical studies!
When’s the book coming out?
While this comment is very well written, I believe the reason you’re not getting a lot of upvotes compared to the other guy is because you didn’t cite a paper, which was the original request.
This sent me on an hour-long scour of a variety of papers, and it ended with me finding one titled “Sexual dimorphism in a neuronal mechanism of spinal hyperexcitability across rodent and human models of pathological pain” by Dedek et al.
In this paper, they take spinal samples from deceased humans and mice and compared sex differences after they doused them in BDNF. They found that the pathway responsible for uptaking BDNF was only active in male samples.
I think you’re extrapolating a little if you’re saying, based on this, that men solely use this pathway for pain and women don’t, but then again, I can’t tell what paper you’re looking at because you never posted it.
TL;DR: what you’re saying about BDNF might be true, but please post sources when making specific claims like that, especially when asked :3
PS your book sounds really interesting
it’s bullshit. that’s why I downvoted it. agreed, it’s well-written, but it’s bullshit none the less, and they are basically fictionalizing the results of the study for their own ends and passing it alone as if it’s factual reality, when it isn’t. most of it is fictionalized re-enforcement of sexist stereotypes.
it’s false information presented as authoritative truth, that has no basis in medical reality, and articulates a lot of magical thinking nonsense. they are pushing a magical thesis and found some study that vaguely supports their magical thinking and are presenting it as some profound truth.
a lot of science writing and reporting suffers from the author getting high on their own supply of verbiage, and often straight up contradicts the study they are reporting on to make it sound more dramatic and profound and meaningful for a lay audience.
and the lay audiences eat it up. CERN is going to cause a blackhole and destroy the planet!, etc.
but people like hearing nice sounding magical nonsense rather than they like bearing boring facts of biology where the differences between men and women he’s citing are entirely trivial.
further there are way bigger factors at play in pain perception than sex, like your genetics, but talking about the COMT (Catechol-O-methyltransferase) gene differences in people influences how they perceive pain isn’t as ‘sexy’ as claiming being born with a vagina gives you magical pain perception powers.
This is fascinating and the way you plan to weave science-fact into science-fiction reminds me a lot of Crichton.
I’m stepping far outside my area of expertise here so please treat this as good faith, uneducated questions.
My understanding is that most of this research is about chronic pain rather than acute pain. I know AFAB people experience chronic pain at like 3x the rates of AMAB people, and that especially immune-moderated pain diseases are much harder to manage in AFAB. I also recognize this is an area of active research and much is yet to be confirmed, but I wonder if acute pain pathways are the same as chronic pain pathways? My limited understanding is that acute pain from tissue damage, etc. is still understood to be nervous system activation for both sexes.
Is it also accurate that these pathways and their activations are largely sex-hormone related? I wonder if that means we could survey trans folks on their experiences of pain before and after transition, both ways.
Thank you for your comment, this has spurred me to do some reading!
Anecdotal, but given how many trans women i know who have developed some form of chronic fuckery or another, i’d believe the hormone drivers. Fascinating things
Also just as I read about this on pubmed because I find this to be very interesting, I find myself angry at how much of this incredibly valuable research has/will be defended by various right wing governments as “woke”. One of these papers by the International Association for the Study of Pain discusses how various hormones may conditionally amplify or suppress pain depending on various factors, rather than a blanket “estrogen amplifies pain” and I just think that’s really fascinating. The body is so complex.
This is an aggregate article I found from IASP that links to some of the studies I found: https://www.iasp-pain.org/resources/fact-sheets/biological-mechanisms-underlying-sex-differences-in-pain/
Really interesting stuff. I suffered from some chronic pain for what felt like forever this past year and so I had done some “basic” reading, but I didn’t bother to go much further beyond what I needed/wanted at the time. This is cool.
Ugh, Mondays…
