Boston Globe - The gender gap: Learning why men and women experience pain differently

Learning why men and women experience pain differently… It’s only recently that researchers have begun to study the exact genetic, physiological, hormonal, and psycho-social factors that may underlie these sex differences. In part, that’s because pain researchers have been hampered by one — rather shocking — fact: Most basic pain research is still done in male mice and rats.

This has been “a catastrophe,’’ says McGill University pain geneticist Jeffrey Mogil, adding that the old rationale that menstrual cycles make females too difficult to study is bogus. Men and women, in fact, can be so different in the way their nervous systems process pain that someday there may be “pink pills for women, and blue pills for men,’’ he says. The lopsided research exists solely because of “inertia,’’ he adds…