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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.

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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom? Never told you?

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Speaker 1: From housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: This is Molly and I'm Kristen Christ and I'm sad today.

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Speaker 1: Oh Holly, where are you said? So we're talking about pain. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's kind of a downer. I'll try and put a

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Speaker 1: band aid on it. We'll put a banded on it. Uh,

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Speaker 1: knowing that we are going to learn things about pain

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Speaker 1: differences among men and women. That's interesting, Molly, and it

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Speaker 1: was interesting, but it was sad to research and all.

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Speaker 1: The whole reason we started researching pain is because we

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Speaker 1: had an email from a listener, which we love, and

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Speaker 1: it asked us whether men and women feel pain any differently,

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Speaker 1: and she cited childbirth. That's sort of what we think

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Speaker 1: of as like an epitome of painful experiences. So some

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Speaker 1: women say it's very pleasurable. I don't know if I

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Speaker 1: trust them. Yeah, you been if there's some cultural idea

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Speaker 1: that men just keep a stiff upper lip whereas girls

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Speaker 1: are just gonna boo who over a skin knee? Our

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Speaker 1: ultimate comeback is you're not pushing a baby out any

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Speaker 1: time during your life, So is childbirth in some way?

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Speaker 1: This is it really like the epitome of pain. If

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Speaker 1: we survive it, can we survive anything? And I did

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Speaker 1: find one really interesting study that suggests that, yes, childbirth

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Speaker 1: can increase your pain tolerance. Yeah, they compared the pain

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Speaker 1: threshold among women who had had children and women who

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Speaker 1: hadn't had children, and they did indeed find that Paris

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Speaker 1: woman who had experienced childbirth had a higher pain threshold

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Speaker 1: than the other women. So now that I think that's

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Speaker 1: really interesting because the rest of the stities we're going

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Speaker 1: to talk about didn't differentiate as far as I know,

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Speaker 1: between women who had given birth and women who hadn't.

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Speaker 1: Because this one study we found suggests that, yes, if

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Speaker 1: you give birth, then nothing will compare to that pain,

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Speaker 1: and obviously all pains are minimized as a result. But

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Speaker 1: every other show we're gonna site is gonna be pretty

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Speaker 1: depressing because it's going to suggest that women feel pain

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Speaker 1: more intensely and more often than men. And this is

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Speaker 1: a pretty recent finding. And the way that these studies

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Speaker 1: and the articles reporting on them were phrased, it seemed

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Speaker 1: like people were very hesitant to say, yes, there are

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Speaker 1: differences between the way men and women feel pain, and

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Speaker 1: women on the whole report feeling more pain than men,

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Speaker 1: because it does seem like a very antiquated knee jerk

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Speaker 1: reaction that implies that women are the weaker sex. But

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Speaker 1: as in a lot of these podcasts Molly, that we

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Speaker 1: do when we compare different things between the genders, it's

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Speaker 1: not so much an argument of better or worse, but

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Speaker 1: simply different. It's different, and it's important because obviously, if

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Speaker 1: you need a pain killer, you want something that will

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Speaker 1: work for you. And knowing that men and women not

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Speaker 1: only feel pain differently, but more intensely for some things

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Speaker 1: than for others, so that you can really tailor a

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Speaker 1: treatment to fit either gender better. So let's walk through

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Speaker 1: just a couple of these um certain conditions that really

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Speaker 1: affect women more than men, and this comes from the

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Speaker 1: Pain Consortium from the National Institutes of Health, and the

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Speaker 1: number one issue that really affects women nine times more

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Speaker 1: than men is fibromyalgia, right, which is basically just pain.

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Speaker 1: You have chronic, widespread pain all over the body, tenderness, soreness,

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Speaker 1: flue like aches, fatigue, headaches, stiffness UM and they don't

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Speaker 1: know a lot about it, but they have some evidence

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Speaker 1: that maybe UM in the brain, just the areas related

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Speaker 1: to pain perception work much differently than people who suffer

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Speaker 1: from fibro mayalgia. And then we have migraines. This is

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Speaker 1: something that you and I have podcasted before, because one

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Speaker 1: in five women experience migraines, whereas only one in seventeen

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Speaker 1: men experienced them, and doctors think that it might have

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Speaker 1: something to do with shifts in hormone levels, because migraines

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Speaker 1: for women often occur around obviously Asian menstruation and during pregnancy.

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Speaker 1: Another one is ostio arthritis. Women report more as arthritic

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Speaker 1: pain and severe pain, and also heart disease. Women in

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Speaker 1: their pre menopossal years experienced chest pain more often than men.

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Speaker 1: But there is one important difference, and we'll come back

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Speaker 1: to this a little more later on, but when it

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Speaker 1: comes to long term extreme pain, specifically things like bone cancer,

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Speaker 1: there is no gender difference between the amount of pain reported.

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Speaker 1: Men and women feel it exactly the pain exactly the

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Speaker 1: same way. It seems like it's a lot more to

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Speaker 1: do with acute pain and um more low level chronic

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Speaker 1: pain as opposed to long standing extreme So we we

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Speaker 1: brought up the difference that girls, you know, cry when

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Speaker 1: they get a skin me, whereas men are expected to

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Speaker 1: keep a stiff upper lip. So one of the first

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Speaker 1: things that these researchers did when they want to figure

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Speaker 1: out if men and women do feel pain differently is

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Speaker 1: to find out if it's all just social motivation. Yeah, basically,

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Speaker 1: did the men want to appear more macho by reporting

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Speaker 1: less pain than is actually going on. So what they

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Speaker 1: did was they gave women more money to participate in

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Speaker 1: a pain sete than they gave men. And first of all,

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Speaker 1: I have to say that every single pain study pretty

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Speaker 1: much is based on sticking your hand and ice water,

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Speaker 1: So maybe just women are smart enough not to do

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Speaker 1: this study. Yeah, they wanted to see how long women

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Speaker 1: or men and women would hold their hand in a

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Speaker 1: bucket of swirling ice water. And some people were offered

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Speaker 1: a dollar to keep their hand and I mean this

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Speaker 1: water is near freezing to keep their hand in there

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Speaker 1: for five minutes, and somewhere giving offered twenty dollars. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so even the women who had the motivation of getting

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Speaker 1: more money, the longer they kept their hand in just

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Speaker 1: gave up, whereas men, you know, they thought men who

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Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't about society, was just about money,

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Speaker 1: would not really care as much. Men who were offered

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Speaker 1: more money did even better. So it suggests, you know,

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Speaker 1: it kind of disprove this whole social motivation theory because

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Speaker 1: they were at starting point and then they added the

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Speaker 1: money motivation. They did above and beyond. So whereas women,

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Speaker 1: even with the money motivation, we're just like, I still

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Speaker 1: feel the pain. Yeah, And and so they think that

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Speaker 1: there must be some kind of biological explanation for why

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Speaker 1: men and women experience pain differently, and research has shown

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Speaker 1: that that is exactly the case. Are different circuits in

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Speaker 1: our our bodies and brains do process pain differently. So

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Speaker 1: I want to talk about Jeanes first, Kristen, Yes, well,

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Speaker 1: let's talk about genes now, going back to childbirth, okay,

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Speaker 1: Gynecologists already know that women prefer certain kinds of pain

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Speaker 1: killers to other mothers and childbirth, for instance, prefer something

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Speaker 1: called now be feed as opposed to morphine. But men,

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Speaker 1: on the other hand, they love the morphine. Men prefer

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Speaker 1: the morphine. It seems to have more of a pain

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Speaker 1: relieving effect on them than the now beefine, and they

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Speaker 1: think that this has to do with pain opioid receptors,

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Speaker 1: which dull pain in the brain. Right, each of those

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Speaker 1: drugs binds two different receptors, and the women that now

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Speaker 1: buffine acts on cappa receptors, which are far less studied

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Speaker 1: than Mu receptors, which is what morphine binds too. And

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Speaker 1: they found that when they give a man a drug

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Speaker 1: that like nor buffine now buffine sorry, binds to the

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Speaker 1: cappa receptors, they don't get any pain relief at all.

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Speaker 1: In fact, sometimes they get they get more pain as

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Speaker 1: a result. So the thing that dampens pain in women's

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Speaker 1: brains doesn't dampen pain in a man's brain. And they've

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Speaker 1: even traces down to the genetic level. A doctor has

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Speaker 1: actually identified the first gene known to be involved in

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Speaker 1: modulating pain thresholds in women, because variations in that gene

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Speaker 1: do not do anything to a man's response on pain,

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Speaker 1: whereas if you have a variation of that gene as

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Speaker 1: a woman, you feel more pain of a lower pain threshold.

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Speaker 1: And interestingly, this gene is also related to hair and

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Speaker 1: skin color. So we have an article on our site

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com called do redheads need more anesthesia?

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Speaker 1: And the thinking is yes, because they have such a

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Speaker 1: variation of this gene, they have a much lower pain threshold.

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Speaker 1: So we have something on the on the genetic, on

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Speaker 1: the neurological level, things that are already happening differently um

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Speaker 1: in our brains to process pain right and to relieve pain. Now,

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Speaker 1: let's say I stubbed my elbow on a on a

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Speaker 1: table and a male steps elbow on the table. Scientists

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Speaker 1: have figured out that just different areas of our brain

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Speaker 1: are lighting up at the very first sign of pain.

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Speaker 1: Forget the pain killer part, but just when we both

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Speaker 1: feel that pain, the man is going to feel something

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Speaker 1: in his analytic or cognitive centers, whereas when I feel

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Speaker 1: that pain, my emotion based limbic regions light up, oh, emotions, emotions.

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Speaker 1: And this is based on U c L A study

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Speaker 1: UM that was the tract of the PET scans pet

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Speaker 1: brain scans of patient steering mild pain stimuli, and it

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Speaker 1: was the study pool was pretty small. It was only

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Speaker 1: twenty six women and twenty four men who were experiencing

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Speaker 1: irritable bowel syndrome. But nevertheless, this is the largest study

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Speaker 1: to date of its kind. Now, what they did was

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Speaker 1: they felt when they found out that the different areas

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Speaker 1: of the brain lit up, they went back to evolution,

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Speaker 1: which I can't say I totally agree with. Evolutionary biology

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Speaker 1: is tricky. It is tricky. So they're saying that the

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Speaker 1: reason that a man's um cognitive centers are going to

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Speaker 1: light up is because the early male role was defending

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Speaker 1: the homestead. So in response to stress or pain, he's

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Speaker 1: going to be very quickly analyzing his fight or flight,

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Speaker 1: you know options. He's got to say, how am I

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Speaker 1: going to protect my homestead. I'm not going to think

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Speaker 1: about this pain an emotional way, whereas that's what they

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Speaker 1: say the women are doing because they've got to protect

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Speaker 1: not necessarily the homestead, but their child. So it has

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Speaker 1: the very emotional reaction to oh, must protect this child. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: the more the more nurturing response. And so I say

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Speaker 1: that evolutionary biology can be tricky because it does always

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Speaker 1: seem to go back to this like idea that you know,

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Speaker 1: men are hunters and gathers. Women are just here to

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Speaker 1: produce children and take care of the home, which does

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Speaker 1: get tiresome at times. I'm not going to moresome, but

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Speaker 1: I guess knowing that is a really good way to

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Speaker 1: cope with it, because um, there was the study recently

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Speaker 1: about how swearing can relieve pain, and they found that

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Speaker 1: swearing relieves pain more efficiently in women than in men

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Speaker 1: because when you swear, it's your limbic region. So by

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Speaker 1: letting loose like that quick emotional outburst to pain, um,

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Speaker 1: they alleviated the pain more quickly. Now, men swear all

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Speaker 1: the time, according to these researchers, so they kind of

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Speaker 1: dulled that reaction. But by you know, a quick emotional

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Speaker 1: response to pain, like you feel it in your emotional

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Speaker 1: part of your brain and then you have a very

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Speaker 1: quick emotional response to it, it helps you get over

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Speaker 1: it better. Apparently, what we're really going to need to

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Speaker 1: come to. In addition to pain and colors are better

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Speaker 1: ways to cope with pain now when it comes to

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Speaker 1: dealing with um, more chronic pain like osteo arthritis, doctors

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Speaker 1: have found that that limbic response, more emotionally charged response

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Speaker 1: that women have to pain can be helpful for men

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Speaker 1: because in comparing the ways that women and men processed

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Speaker 1: UH the osteous rights pain, they found that women who

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Speaker 1: were able to to talk about the pain, to journal

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Speaker 1: it out to, you know, express it to other people,

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Speaker 1: dealt with it better than men who were more likely

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Speaker 1: to just kind of bottle it up, I guess. And

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Speaker 1: that study they showed that the only people who knew

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Speaker 1: that the men were in pain were their wives. So

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Speaker 1: and it wasn't because they said, hey, honey, I'm in pains,

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Speaker 1: because they knew enough about the man to say, oh,

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Speaker 1: he's in pain. Yeah, they were able to see their

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Speaker 1: behavioral cues. So it's almost like by talking about it more,

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Speaker 1: you do better by having that very emotional talking response,

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Speaker 1: which again it's not I don't know, it's not like

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Speaker 1: you want a friend who's always talking about how in

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Speaker 1: pain she is. Well, moll, I'm a black kurts again.

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Speaker 1: But maybe by talking about it over and over to

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Speaker 1: go to the doctor. Yeah, because it could be a

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Speaker 1: going to the doctor, which is where it becomes really problematic.

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Speaker 1: But going back to that U c l A study

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Speaker 1: the lead researcher made emphasize the fact that even though

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Speaker 1: men and women do seem to have this ingrained difference

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Speaker 1: in in pain response, they are complementary. You know, it's

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Speaker 1: not that doesn't necessarily mean that the fact that our

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Speaker 1: limbic system is lighting up while men's cognitive systems are

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Speaker 1: lighting up is necessarily more advantageous than the other. It's

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Speaker 1: supposed to work together, which makes sense because you want

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Speaker 1: a healthy species overall. But you know, you you mentioned

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Speaker 1: earlier the study where there were no differences between men

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Speaker 1: and women's pain in a really chronic condition like cancer, well,

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Speaker 1: extreme pain, extreme physically, but they were saying the reason

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Speaker 1: why it all comes down again to how you cope

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Speaker 1: the pain. Whether there are people who were just you know,

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Speaker 1: living with it and feeling miserable, and then people who

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Speaker 1: were living with it and just charging forward with their

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Speaker 1: life and not letying the pain hamper them. And it

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Speaker 1: all is out to the emotional networks they had around them,

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Speaker 1: if they felt supported, if they felt like they had

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Speaker 1: people they could talk to. Um. So again it's it's

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Speaker 1: more about talking about pain and finding a way to

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Speaker 1: deal with it as opposed to just living with it

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Speaker 1: might seem like an uncomfortable proposition to say that men

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Speaker 1: and women do experience pain differently on a very biological level,

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Speaker 1: it's going to benefit us if doctors do look more

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Speaker 1: into this, because they can develop pain killers that will

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Speaker 1: buill our pain better. And also, some people are advocating

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Speaker 1: for gender specific scales of pain. So if you go

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Speaker 1: into if you're a woman who goes in and sees

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Speaker 1: a male doctor and he says, on a scale, want

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Speaker 1: to tend what's your pain? Um, if she says like

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Speaker 1: a six, he should be able to judge what that

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Speaker 1: is on sort of a female spectrum as opposed to

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Speaker 1: what a six would be for a male. Yeah, because

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Speaker 1: this reminds me too of something that came up when

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Speaker 1: we were talking about antidepressants one time, about how they've

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Speaker 1: been trying to broaden clinical trials with antidepressants to include

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Speaker 1: more women because they used to just exclude us because

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Speaker 1: they would say, oh, well, their hormones are gonna mess

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Speaker 1: with everything. But they're thinking that estrogen levels are very

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Speaker 1: correlated to the way we feel pain. So you know,

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Speaker 1: we obviously need to have you know, more women involved

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Speaker 1: um in all of these medical developments. And I'm glad

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Speaker 1: you brought up estrogen, Kristen, because that was one thing

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Speaker 1: we skipped over before we talked about coping, was maybe

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Speaker 1: the role hormones play and how we perceive pain. And

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Speaker 1: one of the largest groups of people who complain of

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Speaker 1: pain UH is women over the age of forty five,

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Speaker 1: and they are more likely to complain of low back pain,

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Speaker 1: migraine pains, and joint pain including arthritis. And the thinking

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Speaker 1: is is that these women might be menopausal and with

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Speaker 1: the loss of estrogen, that's why they might feel the pain.

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Speaker 1: It may just be aged and maybe you just have

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Speaker 1: more pain as you age. But some researchers have theorized

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Speaker 1: the estrogen is protective and that when estrogen levels are high,

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Speaker 1: the brain's natural pain killer system responds more potently when

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Speaker 1: a painful experience occurs, and when it's low, low pain

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Speaker 1: killer response. But you know, the thing about all of

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Speaker 1: this we should have said this up front, is that

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Speaker 1: my pain is probably different than your pain. Pain is

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Speaker 1: so subjective that it's really hard for us to make

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Speaker 1: some sort of analytic argument out of all of this,

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Speaker 1: but it is interesting to note that in our brains

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Speaker 1: there are different ways, the different circuits for the way

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Speaker 1: things things happen. But only I do think it's interesting

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Speaker 1: to answer our our reader's question, do men and women

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Speaker 1: feel pain differently? The answer is yes, yes, And if

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Speaker 1: you want to up that pain tolerance, have a baby. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's not the takeaway, and no jokes jokes where we

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Speaker 1: get a flood of angry listener mail. A finger pain

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Speaker 1: tolerance is not a good reason to have a child.

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Speaker 1: Babies aren't a pain killers. Oh there's so many directions

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Speaker 1: that could go, but that's a topic for another podcast.

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Speaker 1: Before we get into that, Kristen, should we answer some

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Speaker 1: listener mail? Yes we should, Okay, so our first a

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Speaker 1: listener emails from Kristen, who wrote about the episode why

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Speaker 1: are women so attracted to the vampires? And she had

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Speaker 1: a promise some of our character descriptions um, and as

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Speaker 1: we said, we're not really vampire experts. But she thinks

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Speaker 1: we really missed the mark by only looking at feminist perspectives.

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Speaker 1: She writes, first, and I'd like to point out that

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Speaker 1: I'm not a crazy Twilight fan. Bellis want isn't as

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Speaker 1: vacuous a character as you made her out to be.

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Speaker 1: In fact, she comes from a long line of female

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Speaker 1: protagonists who feel lost and lonely and are essentially outsiders

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Speaker 1: who somehow managed to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. When

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Speaker 1: I read the books, I was struck with the similarities

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Speaker 1: between Bella and some of these other characters, most notably

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Speaker 1: Meg Murray from our Rinkland Time Justice Mag's told to

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Speaker 1: embrace and use her faults, Bella too, eventually finds that

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Speaker 1: her own deficiency is exactly what is needed to save

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Speaker 1: her loved ones. In a very large part, I feel

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Speaker 1: that the attraction of these books is less about the

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Speaker 1: vampires than about the fact the Bella really is sort

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Speaker 1: of an every girl that most of us can identify with,

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Speaker 1: having been here at some point or another and having

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Speaker 1: longed for something, anything, to come along and make us

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Speaker 1: feel special. Thank you, Christen. That's Christian with Okay, not

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Speaker 1: Christian with the Sea. Like. Yeah, I didn't email mom

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Speaker 1: stuff at helst works dot com with my opinion on Twilight, um,

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Speaker 1: but we do have Zoe who did emails email us

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Speaker 1: about her opinion on Twilight. She says, I'm in Grade ten.

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Speaker 1: A large group of my friends are absolutely crazy about

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Speaker 1: the Twilight books, and personally I'm not quite a fan,

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Speaker 1: but they could be. They would be more entertaining if

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Speaker 1: they were better written, she says. After you get past

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Speaker 1: the two pages of how utterly divine and godlike Edward

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Speaker 1: is and how much Bella swims at the thought of

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Speaker 1: his chiseled cheekbones and glittery six pack, the plut is

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Speaker 1: actually quite entertaining and cute to read. I hadn't really

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Speaker 1: thought about it before, but Edward is really a creepy

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Speaker 1: sort of boyfriend, very possessive. I don't know about you, guys,

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Speaker 1: but the whole watching you while you sleep business isn't

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Speaker 1: really something I've ever wanted to deal with, especially if

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Speaker 1: it's by someone who's broken into your house and likes

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Speaker 1: how inviting you smell. Very good point and Zoe creepy. Indeed,

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Speaker 1: she says, she refuses to read the last book, no

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Speaker 1: matter how many times her friends try to force her to. Again,

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Speaker 1: she doesn't really care for getting into Bella's over obsessive

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Speaker 1: mind again, regardless of what Stephanie Meyer is trying what.

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Speaker 1: Regardless of whether Steph mcmyer is trying to make her relatable,

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Speaker 1: her passiveness really bothers me. I would much rather a

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Speaker 1: heroine who isn't very much like me and has opinions

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Speaker 1: and quirks and faults, rather than a rag doll character

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Speaker 1: who doesn't do anything for herself. All right, So there's

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Speaker 1: our two opinions on Bella Swan, the pro and the

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Speaker 1: con camp. What do you guys think? Email us some

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Speaker 1: stuff at how stuff works dot com and if you

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Speaker 1: want to check out our blog during the week, it's

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Speaker 1: called how to Stuff. And if you want to check

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Speaker 1: out that article that Molly mentioned earlier in the podcasts,

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Speaker 1: are do Redheads Need more Anesthesia? I believe? Is the title?

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Speaker 1: You can find it at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Because

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Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,

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