Do Men and Women Experience Pain Differently? :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Do Men and Wo hands Experience Pain Differently?Pain has been an under-researched ara of medicine, tho today physicians be increasingly interested in the workings and intercession of various types of distressingnessful sensation. In sectionalizationicular, a growing body of research exists on the different ways in which men and women may follow out pang and the implications of these differences for medical treatment. Does the elicit of an individual make a difference in their pain experience? Numerous researchers believe that women be to a greater extent cutting to pain than men, while others believe that the differences between the pain experiences of men and women are not significant. Over the course of my research I found that part of the problem in trying to answer the question lies in how scientists total the pain experience of men and women.The difference in the pain experience of men and women is an understudied area because roughly previous studies of pain and its potential treatments fuddle further used men or male animals. For scientists, using except males was simpler since women have reproductive hormone cycles that could complicate the studies. The implication of this, of course, is that sex differences in the experience of pain (and in many other aspects of health) has remained an understudied area. However, in 1993 chair Clinton signed the NIH Revitalization Act, which requires the inclusion of women in NIH research. In 1996 the NIH formed a Pain Research Consortium, and in 1998 the NIH held a conference entitled sex activity and Pain (1).At the NIH conference, some researchers argued that sex differences in pain are substantial and argued specifically that women are more sensitive to pain. For example, women report pain more often and also report it at higher levels than men. Additionally, when men and women are exposed to the same pain stimulus, women will say that they are in pain more quickly than men (1).However, others b elieve that sex differences in the experience of pain may not be so significant. The higher reported pain levels of women may be due more to gender socialization than to biological differences between men and women. For example, in most laboratory pain studies women report about twenty percent more pain than men (2). However, researchers at the University of Florida examined pain reporting of chronic pain patients in a clinical setting and found that women reported only three to ten percent more pain than men, a significantly smaller difference.