Gary is a redhead. I didn’t realize it because he looks towheaded in his black and white childhood photos, and he was a brownhead by his late twenties when I met him. But in the rare color photos from his teens, he was a freckle-free Irish lad with dark auburn hair and a red beard. And of course, he’s all silver now. This means that I have a type: sixty percent of my long-term boyfriends have been redheads. While I sadly never got the chance to see Gary’s red hair in real life, I must have sensed it in my genes.
This week I read that redheads have a mutated MC1R gene, and the same gene makes them more sensitive to pain.
Gary told me in the eighties that redheads feel more pain, but here you go, a scientific paper with more information fairly hot off the press:
They need more Novocaine, yet less opioids. The one time I saw Gary take Oxycodone he said it made him too loopy.
It makes me wonder if it would be helpful for doctors to know he was a redhead once.
2 responses to “TWIL: WHY redheads are more sensitive to pain”
Anesthesiologists and dentists should absolutely be told. (and, if you find one who says it doesn’t make a difference without explaining exactly why their dosing method means it doesn’t make a difference, then find a new one) If other doctors are doing pain relief attempts *and* are receptive to things that haven’t trickled down to their knowledge base yet, then also them, but fewer doctors have the margin to learn about new things at this time, plus there are the previously-extant “I know everything my patients could know about medicine” doctors.
Who feels more pain, of what types: since we don’t really have a way of being able to measure internal experiences and what pain tolerance techniques each person has developed, I don’t know and am somewhat skeptical, since I am a redhead (with anesthesia weirdness) and have more frequently startled doctors with a higher pain tolerance than they were expecting rather than the reverse? *Or* is that just that some things hurt me a lot less because of other medical weirdness? Don’t know.
But definitely worth mentioning Redhead Status to dentists and anyone doing anesthesia!
KC – I wonder often if dead nerves keep me from feeling pain like others do. I certainly don’t feel it the way Gary does.