Do women handle this disease better? | Arthritis Information

 

Just wondering because I am observing a lot of anger from men with chronic illness.Is this from seeing people or opinion from message boards ?I think its because women 'talk it out' ad nauseum.

I'm not sure that women do handle it better, but if men seem to be more angry, it might be because they feel helpless in that they can't control the disease and that just goes against the grain of what they think a man should be.   I would imagine it is much harder to be a man who can't open a jar, or pick up a watermelon, than a woman.  In terms of social expectations.  I guess that's just one part of the difficulty though, and the inherent inability to do something is hard on everyone. It has taken me a long long time to get beyond the anger of having RA. I have mild to moderate so I can only imagine how someone who has moderate to severe must deal with it. I observe men who have had this disease for years are so angry but not sure it is entirely about their RA.

6t5, both. I see men who have MS to be angry, more so than women with the disease. I live in an area with a lot of MS and this is the disease I see the most anger in. I also see young men with cancer diagnoses to be extremely angry and some just never work through it before they die. Women in the same age group with terminal cancer seem to not be as angry. I guess I'll have to look up some studies on it. It could be because women are more verbal and are able to talk through it where as men seem to keep it more to themselves. Found this on chronic pain:
NIH

You probably learned the "telephone switchboard" story of pain in school. Touch a hot stove, the story goes, and a signal races from your finger along your spinal cord to your brain. Your brain perceives the danger and dispatches an urgent message to your hand. You yank your hand away.
     
Scientists now say pain is more complex than that. It's more like the Internet than an old-fashioned switchboard. A single stimulus may prompt multiple signals throughout the body. The pain you feel reflects an interaction between your basic cellular and genetic makeup, your current health, your emotional state, the situation in which the pain occurs, your past encounters with pain, and what you know and think about pain.          
Male and female brains process pain differently

     
Whether you are male or female also influences how much pain you have, what type of pain it is, and how treatment affects you. Male and female brains process pain differently, according to speakers at a conference on gender and pain at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in April 1998. The conference was the first to be wholly devoted to this topic. Some 500 persons attended the 2-day meeting. More than 30 researchers and clinicians described recent findings and progress toward developing safer and more effective ways to relieve pain.
     
"Sexual difference is biology's, that is, life's most potent experimental variable," noted conference speaker Karen Berkley, Ph.D., McKenzie Professor of Neuroscience at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Women report pain more often than men do, she said, and in more body regions. They also have more severe and more persistent pain. When women and men are given the same pain stimuli in laboratory studies--gradually increasing heat, for instance--women say "ouch!" before men do. Women discriminate better between types of pain.          
Women say "ouch" sooner than men

     
Age and sex differences exist in the prevalence of many chronic pain conditions, according to Linda LeResche, Sc.D., research professor of oral medicine, at the University of Washington School of Dentistry, Seattle, Washington. Studying age/sex patterns, she said, may help identify causes of some pain conditions. Migraine headache, as one example, affects mainly women in their childbearing years, decreasing with age. This pattern suggests hormones may play a role in migraines. That is less likely to be true, she said, for a pain problem that continues to rise with age, such as joint pain.
Despite their greater pain burden, speakers said, women handle pain better than men do. Women use more coping strategies, honed perhaps by their more frequent encounters with pain, in menstruation and in labor and childbirth. Women prepare better for pain, Berkley asserted. They plan tactics to handle it. Men more often say, "I'll deal with it when I have to."

Even young boys and girls often differ in how they perceive and cope with pain. Many cultures around the world permit girls to be emotional, but discourage boys from showing pain. These attitudes then are carried into adulthood.

     
Gender differences are a relatively new focus for research. Until recently, scientists seeking to standardize data used only male animals in most laboratory studies of pain. In this way, they eliminated variations induced by normal, cyclic changes in female reproductive hormones.          Gender differences are a new focus for research
     
Many trials of new medications and other treatments excluded women, too. Potential harm to the fetus in pregnant women remains a concern. Some scientists claimed, however, that designing complex studies to include female animals and women would be too costly.
Then, in 1990, the NIH launched its Office of Research on Women's Health, drawing attention to unmet needs in this area. The NIH Revitalization Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, requires that both women and minorities be included in NIH-funded clinical research. In 1996, the NIH established its Pain Research Consortium with representatives from all NIH divisions. Members of this group, plus other NIH centers and offices, sponsored the April 1998 conference on gender and pain.

While most of the conference talks focused on basic understanding of the pain process, some offered insight into specific illnesses that patients and physicians can use today. More attention to gender issues should help ease pain for persons of all ages and both sexes.
Interesting, This would explain ( generally ) why woman complain more about every ache and pain then men. Men sometimes will not even admit pain or refuse to go to the DR. That said in reality I think pain is an individual thingI think men suffer longer before seeking treatment. They suffer longer, they hate to go to the doctor unless absolutely incapacitated, it's a woman's disease and they couldn't possibly have it, and all of the above and more.  I wouldn't want to be a man with a chronic illness.  There's too many macho hurdles for them to get over before they admit to the disease or that they're really feeling bad.  Think how hard it was for us to admit and not go into denial.  Well, I was in denial but that only lasted for about 5 years!!  I don't think it's mentally any worse on men than women but there is a big difference in preceptions and acceptance.  LindyWell my husband & I  I must be the minority then- he complains about every ache and pain (meanwhile takes nothing for it) and I just  do whatever I think will take the pain away and keep my mouth shut.
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