Health and Fitness

Jan. 23, 2012 — The question has been around as long as “he said/she said” has been a phrase: Basically, who is more capable of handling pain?

Though not likely to be the final word, new research shows that women may feel pain more intensely than men do, especially for specific types of pain.

Researchers mined electronic medical records from more than 11,000 men and women. They showed that across 47 diseases and painful conditions considered in the study, women said they felt significantly more pain than men in 14 of them.

As part of the studies, all participants rated their pain on zero-to-10 scales, where zero stands for “no pain” and 10 means the “worst imaginable” pain.

The difference in pain for women was most pronounced for musculoskeletal pain, such as low back pain and/or osteoarthritis. Researchers

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A SALVE FOR AMERICA’S CHRONIC PAIN?: Despite prevalent pain across the U.S., most treatments have remained the same for decades.

Chronic pain affects at least one in three adults in the U.S., which is more than the sum total of those with heart disease, cancer and diabetes combined. For many of these 116 million Americans, their pain is severe and eludes available treatments. In addition to the human suffering, the monetary cost of medical treatment and lost productivity has reached $635 billion a year.

The U.S. needs “a cultural transformation” in the way we view pain, treat it and conduct research on its causes and treatments, says a new report released June 29 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

Pain can be protective.

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