Pain Perception Between Men And Women

Pain Perception Between Men And Women

Have you ever wondered why women outlive men and how does this relate to your life by design model? In Western medicine, the whole concept of wellness is overlooked. Western medicine, practitioners and scientists have made great advances in the management of pathology by studying the disease. When they study physiology, they do so to better understand abnormal physiology or disease. They do not study physiology in the hope they can better understand how to optimize physiology. There has been a great deal of skepticism about wellness-creating devices and healing technologies because of the above perspective.

The fundamental challenge in the model can be stated in the following ways. Subtle energy changes predate biochemical dysfunctions and medical conditions. Western medical professionals will typically ignore these changes because they will maintain these changes have no relation to any changes in physiology. Wellness medicine practitioners who habitually look for these changes and successfully help to optimize the patient’s condition will avert the eventual development of these conditions. The Western medical professional will then claim subtle changes have no relationship to pathology because the patient never went on to develop the alleged biochemical dysfunction medical condition. The medical model basically applies the so-called lock and key paradigm of biochemistry, causing to which any biochemical reaction needs a specific arrangement of the reacting molecules.

Meanwhile, a living organism and its functions cannot be reduced to a set of chemical reactions, even if it were possible to account for all of them. This constitutes a serious problem of any acute treatment, any illness. Illness in general generates a communication gap between the organism’s functional network. Since living beings are highly-integrated open dynamic systems, all health in general and supported by permanent mass-energy and information exchange. The dynamics of communication thus is vital for organisms. One of the fundamental communication processes our body uses to communicate with us when we’re approaching this ease is our emotions. Our emotions are our primary mechanisms that our body-mind uses to communicate how well our lives, physical, mental or emotional are working.

In the Western medicine model, when you’re feeling emotionally unwell like depression, they were prescribed with Prozac. In the wellness medicine model, when you feel unwell, you’re getting a signal about some state of disharmony, whether physical, mental or emotional. Do you want to pay attention to your body-mind or do you wish to drag yourself so that you feel nothing? This is the real difference between Western medicine and wellness medicine. Over the last years that I have been in practice, I have noticed that I have consistently seen more women than men. I used to wonder about it. I used to believe this was because women were more in touch with their emotions and so they knew far earlier that something was not quite right. There is this quite common misperception that women often imagine their pain and it is often part of an attention-seeking mechanism.

In my experience, I’ve yet to meet a female hypochondriac even after more than 15,000 clients. When a woman says she feels something is not quite right, that often is the only real hypochondriac that I ever met with a male. He kept asking me to check him for cancer because his sister had cancer. Eventually, I told him to go and do medical scans to convince himself that he had no cancer because all my testing did not show up any early warning markers of cancer. It was fairly controversial to suggest there were any differences between males and females in the perception and experience of pain. “That is no longer the case,” says Dr. Ed Keogh, a psychologist from the Pain Management Unit at the University of Bath. In male-female differences in pain perception, research has shown while sensory focus strategies used by men helped increase their pain threshold and tolerance of pain. It was unlikely to have any benefit for women according to Dr. Ed. Other research by the Pain Management Unit has looked at the relationship between gender differences and anxiety, sensitivity and pain.

Anxiety sensitivity is the tendency to be fearful of anxiety-related sensations. For example, a rapidly beating heart seems to be important in the experience of pain sensations. In a study of 50 patients referred to a hospital clinic with chest pain, researchers discovered that the factors that predicted pain in men and women were different. Researchers believe it is the fear of anxiety-related sensations and an increased tendency to negatively interpret such sensations more of which are more predominant in women than men that influences women’s experiences of pain.

When do men and women seek help? Prompted by one’s cognitive appraisal of a stressor like pain, individuals respond using various coping mechanisms. Researchers found that men and women differ in the mechanisms of coping with stress, particularly coping with pain. Some researches citing other studies reported that women will frequently use coping strategies that include active behavioral and cognitive coping, avoidance, emotion-focused coping, eating, social support, relaxation and distraction. Men rely on direct action, problem-focused coping, talking problems down, denial, looking at the bright side of life and tension-reducing activities such as alcohol consumption, smoking and drug abuse.

Research has found that women’s ways of coping involved more expressions of feelings and seeking social support. Whereas men’s way of coping was more rational and stoic, accepting the situation, engaging in exercise. Other research has found that in response to pain, women reported significantly more problem solving, social support, positive self-statements and palliative behaviors than men. Other researchers found that among individuals, that long-term intractable pain in the neck, shoulders or back, woman increased their behavioral activity, household chores and social activities as a coping strategy more than men.

Other studies suggest that coping strategies are influenced more by the type and duration of pain, not by whether the person is a male or a woman. Research has also shown that men and women are quite different because women respond more aggressively to pain through health-related activities like taking medication and consulting a health care provider. This is consistent with studies that have shown that women tend to report more healthcare utilization for treatment of pain than do men. I once saw this lady who was worried about the health of her children. Reports suggested significant metal toxicities and they were doing poorly health-wise. I also suggested that she check herself out.

Eventually, she came in with her husband and I suggested what tests they should do. They had to leave on a holiday. When they came back, the lady sent me an email asking me about what testings she should do. I gave her a more elaborate list. Then she asked me about her husband and I gave him a simpler list of tests to do. She later queried me about the difference. I replied that unless men cannot work, are disabled by pain and cannot move or they are so sick and have a nervous breakdown, they maintain this veneer of stoic stolidity and attitude that says, “I’m fine.” I told her I was being respectful of this. Whereas women tend to be more proactive and prefer to pre-empt trouble. She was very amused by my response. Men wait until what happens to them creates an impasse and the ability to work or be effective.

They wait until the last minute and until everything that can go wrong has gone wrong or broken down. My personal opinion is that women are more proactive, more sensitive to pain and seek early intervention. They evaluate and assess their life quality on a regular basis. They practice life by design on a more regular basis. They often discard what does not work earlier than men. They are more interested in the intervention before the quality of life is compromised. They are more interested in prevention. Their focus is on evaluating a problem, discarding what didn’t work and implementing solutions before it erupts into something serious, a serious issue they discovered earlier. This may be one factor why women outlive men.

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