Carol McGiffin
THEWAY ISEEIT... Wisewords fromourfeisty, fearless andfunny columnist A PAIN!
‘Astudy conducted by the University of Miami and published in The Journal of Pain, on the perceptions of pain in men and women, concluded that women’s pain is better treated with psychotherapy than with conventional medicine because it’s not as intense as men’s. Okaaaay, so women’s pain is all in the mind and we’re just mad, emotional wrecks while men genuinely suffer, right? Brilliant. I haven’t laughed so much and so hard in ages!
First of all, because it’s difficult to believe that such a study could ever have been necessary, but second, the method they used meant they showed videos of people expressing their pain.
Seriously, who doesn’t know that all men exaggerate their pain? Or that all women play it down? I’m not even generalising, that is the simple truth and there are loads of examples to prove it.
Like, if a woman has a cold, you more than likely wouldn’t know because she wouldn’t mention it. Yet if a man gets one, he takes to his bed, puts on a “sick” voice, expects you to mop his brow and announces every time he’s having a Lemsip. In fact, come to think of it, they don’t get colds, it’s always “man flu”!
I once capped my own knee in an accident, an injury so bad it needed seven stitches but I still went on holiday the next day and managed to walk around a busy city in acute pain without a whisper. Mark, on the other hand, once suffered a tiny scratch on his leg in the same busy city and was convinced not only that he would lose his leg, but that he would actually die!
I’m pretty sure every woman out there has a similar comparison…’