Article: Men and women remember pain differently

[Ravn]

From the press release:

The research team, led by colleagues from McGill and University of Toronto Mississauga, found that men (and male mice) remembered earlier painful experiences clearly. As a result, they were stressed and hypersensitive to later pain when returned to the location in which it had earlier been experienced. Women (and female mice) did not seem to be stressed by their earlier experiences of pain.

https://mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/men-and-women-remember-pain-differently-293050

Based on this article: Male-Specific Conditioned Pain Hypersensitivity in Mice and Humans
Loren J. Martin et al, Published: January 10, 2019
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31496-9

 

[Arnie Pye]

One thing that comes to mind in connection with memories of pain is that many women suffer excruciating period pain (when they aren't pregnant). They also give birth. In the days before birth control women might go through as many as 10 - 20 pregnancies and births. Women experience far more pain than men do as part of normal life. Throughout history, if a woman with excruciating period pains didn't learn some means of coping with it they might end up killing themselves or might be denied food because they couldn't work (and so starved to death). The ones who learned to deal with it lived, the others didn't. The same comments probably apply to women going through pregnancy after pregnancy.

From the second link above :

Both the persistence of pain after tissue healing and the transition of acute into chronic pain have been attributed to associative learning; that is, chronic pain is increasingly viewed as a form of emotional learning designed to protect against threat.

The above quote is completely at odds with the situation described in this link : https://www.abdopain.com/abdominal-adhesion.html

Abdominal adhesion is a band of scar tissue that forms inside the abdomen as part of the healing process, after surgery, infection, bleeding, or endometriosis involving the abdominal or pelvic cavity.

You can think of an adhesion as you would scar tissue that remains on the skin after a wound heals.

The difference is that an abdominal adhesion tends to form into cord-like structures that can wrap around bowels or other abdominal organs, causing them to stick together, or stick to the abdominal wall itself.

When this happens, an adhesion can cause chronic abdominal or pelvic pain and other complications such as female infertility, difficulties voiding urine, and intestinal obstruction (Obstetrics and Gynecology International).

Symptoms of pelvic adhesions can include:

Abdominal Pain

Abdominal pain is the most common symptom of pelvic adhesion.

In a recent study, abdominal or pelvic adhesion were found at laparoscopy in more than 25% of women suffering from chronic pelvic pain. Only 10% of women without chronic abdominal or pelvic pain were found to have abdominal adhesion.

The pain in the abdomen occurs because over time, adhesion bands can develop their own nerve fibres and blood vessels, which cause pain when these nerves are stretched by bowel movements or other factors inside the abdominal cavity. This pain can be sharp and intermittent or dull and more persistent.

Bowel or Intestinal Obstruction

The October 2012 issue of Frontiers in Medicine, reports that adhesive small bowel obstruction is a frequent cause of hospital admission. More recent studies show that postoperative abdominal adhesion is the most common cause of bowel obstruction in the Western world.

Adhesions can spread in a spider web-like formation inside the abdominal cavity and restrict the normal movement of the bowels or intestines, trapping and entangling loops of bowel and causing obstruction.

Symptoms of bowel obstruction include colicky abdominal pain, feeling bloated, nausea, vomiting and constipation or inability to empty your bowels. Occasionally, the bowel is able to "free" itself from the grip of adhesions and symptoms may resolve on their own.

I've been told by doctors in the past that adhesions don't cause pain and it is all in my head. I won't say what I thought of that, it might get me banned.