A 'NORMAL' PAIN RESPONSE: GENDER
What could be a more popular question for scientific investigation than finding out whether women or men have a higher threshold for pain? There is therefore a vast literature on the subject and the results are contradictory and chaotic. Nowhere in this research is the meaning of a painful stimulus considered because the subjects are treated as pain-detecting machines in the same way that one might test a light meter. Familiarity with an event changes the meaning.
A very careful Canadian study recently showed that women had a higher threshold for heat pain whereas men had a higher threshold for painful electric shocks. In our society, women have far more experience of handing hot plates with apparent impunity while men, with their enthusiastic fiddling with car engines and electrical gadgets, are usually familiar with tingling or stabbing electric shocks. Nowhere is this difference in the common experience of men and women mentioned as a factor in the difference of thresholds. The meaning of the pain has been ignored or the subject has been trained that the particular experimental pain has no meaningful consequences.
Related to tolerance and meaning is the level at which one complains in public. This is measured in practice by the stage of disease at which the doctor is visited. Western men are famous for neglecting of themselves on this measure. Prostate disease is a very common occurrence in men. Enlargement of the prostate is almost universal as men age, and prostatic carcinoma is the third most common cancer. Every doctor is all too familiar with the male patient on his first visit who reports getting up several times a night to urinate, a prolonged and painful effort to urinate, and wetting his pants. The condition has been developing for years but the man excuses his late request for help on such silly grounds that he did not want to bother the doctor, or he could cope, or it was not all that bad. Most Western women who develop a problem urinating with frequency and urgency are round to the doctor like a shot. For whatever may be the cultural reason, women seek help at an earlier stage of a disease than do men.
Of course, men and women have some diseases specific to them, but they also have a lot in common. In all Western societies, women visit doctors more frequently than men, and this is not entirely caused by the additional problems of feminine anatomy. Over a lifetime, women are healthier than men in the sense that they live longer.
The lower threshold for complaint to others has practical social consequences. In a large general hospital, female nurses shared the responsibilities for postoperative patients in both male and female wards. It was found that the consumption of analgesics was much higher in the male wards than in the female wards. The nurses were carefully observed and interviewed. Their consistent attitude was that if a male patient complained of pain it must be serious because everyone knew that male patients were a tough lot and should be taken seriously. On the other hand, they had a different attitude to their fellow females, who were generally considered by these nurses to make a great fuss about minor problems and therefore were to be brushed off with a minimal response. The poor women were victims of their own social stereotype.
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