Pain is the great equalizer

To get a clear understanding of pain, we need to go back into time. For those of a strictly literal mind, this is somewhere between 6 and 10 thousand years to when God made 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. Anyway, 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. Survival was the key to the door of time. So with the world divided into eaters and the eaten, a nervous system 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 fiercely as an animal in pain. In this, humans are the same. Except we developed a gender-based system of roles.

Whereas most other species have the sexes more or less equally exposed to danger, human men hid their mates away in caves while they went 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 more elaborate buildings, machismo depends on the men living up to 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.

Now that we have this thin veneer of civilization wrapped around our lives, we tend to count things. For our purposes, this includes a count of the number of prescriptions written every year. This shows a remarkably consistent phenomenon. In every possible category of <A HRef="http://www.newpharmweb.com/more/tramadol-and-the-politics-of-pain.html">painkiller</A>, women outnumber men. It seems 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 decisions based on statistics like this. So, when it comes to allocating resources to hospitals, clinics and and staff to run them, everything gives preferences to the expectation that they will be treating more women than men.

In most cases, this does not matter because the pharmaceutical industry recognized a vital fact early on. The basic biology of men and women is the same when it comes to 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 no matter what your shade of sexual orientation. The drug works on brain chemistry to block the message from the site of the injury. <A HRef="http://www.newpharmweb.com/">Tramadol</A> and the other analgesic drugs are one of the very few examples of exactly equal and non-discriminatory treatment between the sexes.