Studies Suggest Men Handle Pain Better

April 17 -- Back off, Tarzan. You can swing through the trees while cradling Jane, but that doesn't mean if you both fall it's going to hurt her more than you. Or does it?

Study after study has shown that men have a higher tolerance for pain than women, according to researchers who seem to be making some progress in figuring out why.

"Men and women differ in their pain tolerance," says psychologist Roger Fillingim of the University of Florida, who has spent years trying to learn why. "There's no debate on that."

Pain Measurement Too Subjective

The debate among experts, he says, is over why. Until recently it was thought that Tarzan was just being Tarzan, and men denied their pain to protect their masculine image. A higher tolerance, so the theory went, was just macho stuff.

But a number of studies now indicate that there is much more than the preservation of masculinity at work here. There appear to be fundamental differences in how the two genders deal with pain. And it's not just an academic issue.

"If it were just the fact that women are reporting pain more readily than men, that's not a big deal. But I don't think that's the important stuff," Fillingim says. "The important stuff is that certain factors, whether they be psychological, hormonal, whatever, may influence pain differently in women than in men, and vice versa. If that's the case, then we may need to apply different treatments to women than men in order to reduce their suffering."

The problem, as Fillingim readily admits, is that pain is a very difficult thing to study. You can't put it on the lab bench and look at it through a microscope.

"We're hamstrung by the fact that pain is a subjective experience," he says. "We rely on the person to tell us what they are feeling, and that has all kinds of problems."

Researchers have adopted fairly standardized methods for assessing responses to painful stimuli in an effort to reduce the influence of such things as male stereotyping, but in the end the work still hinges on what the person says. Some scientists are developing techniques that might reduce that by giving injections that will produce uniform levels of pain among a variety of subjects, but that's still in the experimental stage.