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Sunday, September 19, 2010

Hurt is the heavy balance

To get a clear interpreting of pain, we need to go back into time. As those of a stringently literal mind, this is someplace between 6 and 10 thousand years to when God created the world. For the rest of us, that's just a wee bit more than 4 billion years. But we can agree to disagree about a few years. In any case, with the first animals swimming around and later crawling out on to land, the big drive was to establish each new generation stronger than the last. Endurance was the key to the door of time. So with the world carved up into eaters and the eaten, a systema nervosum designed to tell the potential victim that it was about to become lunch was indispensable. And so pain was born into the world. Nothing runs as fast or fights as ferociously as an animal in pain. In that, human beings are as is. Except we acquired a gender-based system of roles.

Whereas most additional species have the sexes approximately equally exposed to danger, human men hid their mates away in caves while they got out into the world to hunt and gather. With the males therefore cast as the hunters and warriors, their status and prestige depended on their fighting ability to kill the prey animals and defend the tribe. In part, this defines men through the ages. Even though we left the caves and moved into ever a lot of complicate buildings, machismo turns on the men fulfilling their image as the powerful sex. Put the other way round, it's bad for the image to admit weakness - which includes admitting to injury and pain.

At present that we have this thin veneer of civilization wrapped around our lives, we tend to count things. For our determinations, this includes a count of the number of prescriptions written each year. This shows a remarkably consistent phenomenon. In every possible category of painkiller, women outnumber men. It looks women are always willing to admit to pain and, more importantly, seek help. Men's reluctance means that, apart from the ability to die, they are less commonly diagnosed as having any of the more common diseases and disorders. States make policy conclusions based on statistics like this. So, when it bears on allocating resources to hospitals, clinics and and staff to run them, everything gives orientations to the expectation that they'll be treating more women than men.

In most cases, this doesn't matter because the pharmaceutical industry recognized a vital fact early on. The basic biology of men and women is the same when it bears on how they react to drugs. Because men tend to be physically larger, they get larger doses. But if you have a pain, you get Tramadol disregarding what your shade of sexual orientation. The drug processes brain chemistry to block the message from the site of the injury. Tramadol and the other analgesic drugs are among the very few examples of exactly equalize and non-discriminatory treatment between the sexes.