>Whereas men are the opposite - we don’t feel a thing during childbirth, but man, afterwards, what a pain…
Good point. Kidney stones are way easier to take care of once you get them out.
This isn’t just a female thing, though (the change in perception, I mean, not the childbirth thing). The “looking back through rose-colored glasses” is a standard pattern across both genders.
Why do doctors just let women suffer through labor pain instead of giving them drugs? Is there a danger to using drugs, or is it some quasi-religious devotion to “natural” childbirth? The whole point of giving birth in a hospital is to prevent the “natural” risks inherent in the process, after all.
Of course there’s a potential danger, all drugs have them no matter what purpose they’re applied to. As for labor drugs in particular, here are the risks of using an epidural. Obviously only a small % of women experience each of these outcomes, but you can’t fully predict who will.
Exclusion of women? Bwuh? Cite?
Let? Women giving birth can make these decisions themselves generally. I had my daughter with no pain medication because it was the best choice for me. Labor lasts for a shorter time on average for women who don’t receive epidurals, and I was Group B Strep positive, so the shorter labor meant less chance of my daughter getting infected. Nearly all anesthesia can affect the baby, and although I do trust that they have figured out how not to do much harm to the newborn, it can make them a bit sleepy which makes them less likely to nurse immediately. No big deal in most cases, but I was diabetic and having an alert baby meant that they did not give her sugar water, a common practice for newborns of diabetic mothers.
I do remember an experiment I read about in a college psych text book. The subject sat at a table and the tester bent their finger backward with no explanation. The men reacted strongly, tending to yell or at least verbally react. Many of the women just smiled at the tester.
From my personal experience, kidney stones hurt worse than labor pains. Kidney stones hurt worse than a third degree tear, and kidney stones hurt worse than being sewn up after a third degree tear with no pain medication. The only things that I have experience that are worse than passing kidney stones is severe burns, or once, a drug reaction that triggered a pain reaction not related to any physical symptom.
>Exclusion of women? Bwuh? Cite?
Captain Carrot, I’ve read many times that medical studies often consider men only. The sense I get is that this started for now vague reasons and a more recent trend is to expect researchers to have a more enlightened attitude. I haven’t heard that there is some conspiracy to exclude women; rather, it’s an old habit people are being encouraged to break.
No cite, but I’m sure I’ve read about this at least 5 times.
I have read peer reviewed studies about this, as well as reading about the general trend in college text books and in various popular media. Reasons for excluding women, were often entirely bogus, The famous aspirin’s effect on hear attack study was done entirely on mail doctors and the reason given was that they did not have a ready population of women whom they could trust to take the medicine punctually and would understand the importance of of accuracy in self reporting etc. The response to that generally was, “Hello?!? Nurses?” That study was fairly recent so they bothered to give an excuse. Formerly it was just the way things were, and it continued largely unquestioned, or at least unquestioned by anyone who mattered. It was assumed that women would respond identically to men, and they had the troublesome tendency to get pregnant, have menses, etc. so they were avoided as study subjects. Also, buy having two sets of test and control subjects, you needed twice the sample size for the same confidence in your results, so having two populations like that is expensive, and if you assume the reactions are identical, it is an unnecessary expense. The last information I had on the subject was that it was improving slowly.
Thank you, Lee - for now much less vague reasons. It is an interesting shift in so many areas, away from what now seems preposterous but what used to pass as expected. I was just thinking about this regarding the movie “The Apartment”, a Shirley MacLane and Jack Lemmon classic in which a young, pretty, innocent elevator operator gets passed around like a pawn between men who seem not to have the slightest idea she could also have a free will. This view now is so out of place that the movie, which wasn’t supposed to be a statement on this issue, doesn’t seem to work right anymore.
Other issues that women must consider when choosing epidural or the now less common spinal block is the chance of subsequent headaches. The puncture leaks, and even if done well, can leave the subject feeling a quart low. It was an odd sensation, and things that jarred my head hurt in a weird way for several weeks. Many women get quite severe headaches afterward, and a passing small number get permanent headaches. My mother described the resulting headache as worse she had ever had.
In 2002, research revealed that the type of needle tip, and size, as well as the orientation of the tip made a big difference in how much leaked. I think it is interesting that so little was known about something that can affect the success and aftereffects of such a widely used procedure.
My mother is in pain every day, usually “from the top of the head to both little toes”; she’s one of those people for whom it’s faster to tell you what does not hurt than what does. Because it’s her normal status, she doesn’t complain and soldiers on.
She’s now had the flu for a week and, since it’s not pain she’s accustomed to, she’s happy to whine at anybody who’ll listen. In her case, “joint pain caused by flu” involves only a few more joints than “joint pain caused by arthrosis:” you can bet she’s complaining about her rib joints hurting like nobody’s business. The hands, hips, arms, legs, shoulders, skull? Ah, no, that’s business as usual, those she doesn’t complain about.
So another vote for “it really depends on which person and which pain we’re talking about.”
>one of those people for whom it’s faster to tell you what does not hurt than what does
“Hi, sweetheart. Is anything OK?”
This is what I would speculate too. IME people who have endured more pain tend to have a higher threshold. If the worst pain you’ve ever had was a papercut, hitting your thumb with a hammer will rank very high on your comparative pain meter. I suspect that holds true for psychological trauma as well.
I would be curious to see the results of an experiment where they test pain threshold and separate women into groups of “had natural childbirth” and “no kids” as well as comparing men in categories such as “accountant” and “construction worker” (or split along some other lifestyle lines so you have “men who bash themselves regularly” and “men who have never even gotten their hands dirty”). If my theory holds, the people who have more routine experience with pain or discomfort, probably have a higher pain threshold than those for whom a busted finger would be excruciating.
Also, if my theory holds true, then back in ye olden days of yore, when women had more kids and had them at home (like my grandma) without medical assistance, it would have been more reasonable to suggest women had a higher pain threshold, because they were just more used to dealing with it.
On preview: My theory is stupid.
Anecdotal: Hang around a tattoo parlor one day. Women don’t handle the pain very well.