Pain,

we're not all the same

Some things need to be much more widely shared. For example :
Men and women process pain differently.

This study found:

Blocking the opioid system with naloxone inhibited meditation-based pain relief in men, suggesting that men rely on endogenous opioids to reduce pain.

Naloxone increased meditation-based pain relief in women, suggesting that women rely on non-opioid mechanisms to reduce pain.

"These results underscore the need for more sex-specific pain therapies because many of the treatments we use don't work nearly as well for women as they do for men," said Zeidan.

What this study reveals is similar to others that have shown that there are radical differences between how well a drug will work on a man compared to a woman. Using healthy young male volunteers to test drugs is a totally flawed approach.

All of that said, we continue to treat symptoms and not the causes, such as pollution, contaminated water, soils, poor diets, poor housing, and inequity.

We can add climate change to the above list. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health estimates that the 2022 heatwaves caused 68,000 excess deaths. They go on to estimate that more than half of these deaths were due to human-induced climate change. A heatwave that would have killed a large number of people killed 56% more because it was made more severe by our messing with the climate. This study looked at excess deaths, the number of people made ill or who simply suffered through it isn’t included.