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Redheads Feel Pain Differently Than the Rest of Us
schwit1 writes "If you think redheads are inherently different, well, you'd be right; they're better than you. In fact, they have a higher pain threshold than most of us, and can handle spicier food, too. It turns out that gingers are less sensitive to stinging pain in the skin, according to researchers who injected capsicum, the active ingredient in chilies, into the arms of patients. Professor Lars Arendt-Nielsen, one of the researchers, said, 'Our tests showed that redheads are less sensitive to this particular type of pain. They react less to pressure close to the injected area, or to a pinprick. They seem to be a bit better protected, and that is a really interesting finding.' The finding also means redheads can handle spicier food, reports Science Nordic. It lends some scientific weight to previous suggestions that gingers have a different pain response to the rest of, which were even investigated by MythBusters."
That's what happens when you are without a soul.
This report jibes with my own ongoing research into the pain threshold of redheads. In the videos, they seem to almost enjoy the pain. It is quite fascinating stuff!
"I'm not like other people. Pain hurts me" - Daffy Duck
All this time I thought that calling someone a 'ginger' was pejorative.
My hair color ranges from brown to noticeably red depending on the season and sunlight. I get it bad enough that I eat everything with hot sauce. Chicken, beef, french fries, potato chips, popcorn, straight from the bottle on occasion. Now I need to brace for a whole new round of ribbing that this might be due to my hair color than just my incredibly bad taste in food :(.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Redheads need more anesthetic to dull pain: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1362956
Greater response to pentazocine: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=153647
And morphine: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1736101
So there's clearly something about MC1R that differentiates pain / killer response; but please stay off the soulless daywalker stuff. It's not helpful and just sounds juvenile.
Oh wait, this is slashdot, I forgot. Whereas you had to invent kick a redhead day, why don't we have kick a geek day? Oh, because that's EVERY DAY... :-)
Ha, best of all the captcha is "placid".
There has been some discussion that fair skinned people in general suffer from this phenomenon. I say suffer because while having a high pain tolerance might be cool it makes it a lot harder to anesthetize people like this. This is double so for fair skinned redheads (which many are). I've seen this personally as I am fair skinned. I don't have the increased pain tolerance or the red hair but I am harder to anesthetize, locals have been difficult because I typically need more than normal sometimes. What the researchers should do next is look into the instance for people who have supposedly "woke up" during surgery being paralyzed yet still feeling the intense pain of surgery in progress.
I have red hair and my wife has red hair. I can tell you that skin gashes and getting jabbed friggin' hurts, and since I like working on old cars I get a lot of that kind of damage to my hands and arms, and I've never liked needles. I'll definitely never be an intravenous drug user or tattoo junkie.
Both of us have somewhat thin hair. I wonder if those redheads with really thick hair might have something different enough going on to where their pain receptors are not as sensitive.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You know, we've come a long way. We used to put people down for a host of things. About a century ago we got over the notion that women weren't smart enough to vote. Not so many decades ago being black and flirting with a white woman could get you killed. I'll bet more than a few of you are acquainted with the idea that "nerd" was not a badge of honor way back in high school. Like I say, we've come a long way, but it's somehow still cool to put down the "gingers".
Grow up already.
And not to be totally off topic, but this notion of people with red hair having a differing response to pain has been known for a long time. Wikipedia has references going back at least decade. I'm pretty sure I've known about this for longer than that. Finding older refs is left as an exercise for the reader.
according to researchers who injected capsicum, the active ingredient in chilies
TFS is wrong, as specified in TFA the ingredient is capsaicin
Cue the obligatory "you must be new here" for expecting editors to edit...
Are they testing someone in the same genetic pool that isn't a ginger? Because different ethnic groups are going to be conditioned to respond to and express things differently.
Personally, I have brown hair and a very high pain threshold. Everyone in my family is the same way and none of us are gingers. I further don't think it's genetic in our cases. We have an ingrained and conditioned intolerance to whining in ourselves and others. It's just a family thing. We don't express it and we don't respond to it.
So to take this seriously, I'd need to know they were doing an apples to apples comparison to remove cultural and ethnic distinctions.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I put sambal on my bread in the morning, i so love that stuff, and I have black hair. I have yet to see any of my red friends try that.
I'm the only fair skinned redhead in my immediate family (and indeed, my closest redhead relation was my grandfather), and in regards to spicy foods, this explains something. Whenever I cook I always go with a heavy spice load, my family complains about it- all blondes and brunettes. I honestly thought they were just wusses.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
"...which were even investigated by MythBusters."
Not to mention the more well known science show, South Park.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yes, but not the upholstery. http://xkcd.com/508/</obxkcd>
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Beard turns ginger, hair is brown, English / Scottish / Irish heritage back a way.
I can confirm my love for chili but my personal pain tolerance is probably one of the worst for any living adult male in existence. I can't take the most basic pain, excercise hurts too much, everything hurts too much. I have incredibly sentive ribs and hate being jabbed in them. The simplest of bumps hurt and I'm sure things shouldn't hurt this much.
Time to rethink all of your redhead BSDM fantasies.
Actually I'd call bull on this one. My exwife ...
Oh your ex wife! OK then we'll just disregard the all the studies with those unnecessarily large sample sizes then, shall we?
Finally science can explain Carrot Top.
http://www.google.com/search?q=carrot+top
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
I guess that explains why my wife has rules about how much chili powder and cayenne I'm allowed to use in the chili.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
My blond girlfriend says she is going to dye her hair tomorrow so she doesn't have to take Pamprin every month.
"Capsicum" is the British/Australian English term for the fruit known in American as the bell pepper. The chemical in chillies is actually called capsaicin.
Having the pain threshold be somewhat lower than the point at which physical damage occurs seems optimal.
People born without the ability to feel pain struggle to stay alive to adulthood, which many would interpret as worse rather than better.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
There's difference between an anecdote and a scientific study.
Then again, you go to a chiropractor. A chiropractor who has a TENS machine.
I even had a doctor's confirmation of this.
Interesting. Please, go on.
We went to the same Chiropractor.
Fail
Required reading for internet skeptics
If you think redheads are inherently different, well, you'd be right; they're better than you.
Who said that less pain is better?. People that not feel pain (analgesia disease), can't live normally.
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I am currently the servant of an Orange Tabby cat. He's about as close to the cartoon Garfield as a real-life cat could be.
First -- it seems obvious to me that the genes that make humans red-headed are the same as the ones that make cats orange -- the color is virtually the same and they have freckles on their nose and lips that darken as they spend more time in the sun.
He is not a "scaredy-cat" like other cats. He only hides when he is the hunter. He regular stands up to dogs 5 times his size when they come onto his yard.
This fearless seems to be normal for Orange cats -- anyone who has owned one will tell you the same.
I have also noticed that he seems to be virtually immune to pain. ;)
When he was young, he learned that he should never turn his back on a dog -- because his tail got bitten
It should have been a painful wound, but he never got very upset about it when the vet and I cleaned and dressed it.
I never deliberately hurt him -- but accidents happen -- and he never seems to be hurt.
I have always suspected that his fearlessness might be the result of reduced sensation of pain.
This might also explain the reputation for bravery that Lions have -- they are orange cats too !
Red-haired women (FTA notes most studies have been conducted on female mice and female women) have a resistance to capsaicin. Compared to whom? Blonde-haired white people? Brown-haired white people?
How about Koreans, NONE of whom have genetcially-derived red hair? Or Latinos? Or Vietnamese? One could to this all day.
blog
FTA:
...
...
Research reveals that redheads:
are more sensitive to cold
In other respects, however, redheads turn out to be tougher than other people.
Research has produced evidence that redheads are less sensitive to stinging pain in the skin.
This was shown in tests where capsaicin, the active substance in chilli, was injected into the skin to produce pain.
"Our tests showed that redheads are less sensitive to this particular type of pain. They react less to pressure close to the injected area, or to a pinprick. They seem to be a bit better protected, and that is a really interesting finding," says Professor Lars Arendt-Nielsen of the Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction at Aalborg University.
Tough to melee a guy that doesn't feel pain as strongly as you. What if most berserkers had red hair? Due to their ironic sensitivity to cold, it probably wouldn't take much to push them over the edge after days of rowing the frozen oceans. I'll bet after leaving their warm yurts, they were even more pissed they hadn't left the Land of Ice and Snow as fast as the recruiter promised...
[No redheads were intentionally slighted in the making of this post.]
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
The fifth golden girl was a female communist cosmonaut from the USSR :)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Reduction in skin pain seems very useful when you're at a much higher risk of sun burn.
No it is simply a case of the red-headed stepchild being such an obnoxious turd that the step parent(dad) want to smack the little turd in question upside the head. But what I really wanted to ask you is WTF is an I'ma?
redheads are also known to be less responsive to anesthesia, so that explains the dentist part.
And if redheads are less sensitive to pain - does that include mental pain?
This may lead to an explanation to why it is said that redheads are wilder than others. When they were penalized for doing something wrong when they were kids wasn't hurting them as much compared to other kids even though the penalty was the same.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I call bull on this being a troll. A TENS machine. Really. Come on. This is Grade A pseudoscience.
He is not a "scaredy-cat" like other cats. He only hides when he is the hunter. He regular stands up to dogs 5 times his size when they come onto his yard.
This fearless seems to be normal for Orange cats -- anyone who has owned one will tell you the same.
Confirmation bias.
My cat's black and switches between tame and extremely vicious. It has also won fights with much larger dogs. Temperament is genetically biased but environmental in nature.
Are you sure she was really a redhead? There's a simple test you can perform, but sadly this comment box is too short to explain it to slashdot readers.
BSD it is.
What the researchers should do next is look into the instance for people who have supposedly "woke up" during surgery being paralyzed yet still feeling the intense pain of surgery in progress.
That will be hard to do. They normally give surgical patients a drug that inhibits the transcription of temporary to permanent memory. They might have been awake and suffering horribly - but they won't remember it afterward.
This does two useful things: It reduces post traumatic problems. And it also reduces malpractice suits.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There's difference between an anecdote and a scientific study.
Do you have the statistics to back that up?
My exwife was a red head and she had one of the lowest pain tolerances I've ever seen.
Are you sure you didn't accidently try to give her anal?
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Redheads as a group have both higher and lower than average responses to different types of pain.
My wife, who is a red head, has a very low pain threshold as well. Whenever she accidentally bumps into something, you get the impression that she's broken a bone or cut off a body part. In the beginning I jumped up right away, but now I got used to it so whenever I hear a loud, spine chilling scream, I barely look up anymore. She's always using the "red heads are more sensitive to pain" excuse, but now I can point her to this article! :-)
All these years of torturing and burning must account for something! Are they fire-proof as well?
My sister is a redhead with low pain tolerance also.
It's probably a linked gene, which is also mutated, which would mean, that redheads are more likely to have reduced pain thresholds compared to others.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
it seems obvious to me that the genes that make humans red-headed are the same as the ones that make cats orange
Cat colours are due to variations in the womb, not genetic. That is why cloned cats generally do not look like their gene donors.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
This adds a whole new meaning to the term 'Ginger ninja'.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
sadly this comment box is too short
That's what she said!
A pal and a confidant! Sheesh. Get it right people.
Life is not for the lazy.
Did you ever get to see what her natural hair color is?
I am currently the servant of an Orange Tabby cat.
Finally, a cat owner acknowledges his role in the human/cat relationship!
Someone had to say it.
Seastead this.
The linked. mutated gene means she's also more likely to have super-powers. Watch your back.
My redhead sister may have low pain tolerance, but damn, she can certainly dish it out.
I can anecdotally confirm the anesthetic resistance...I had a no more kids procedure done under local. It required two incisions, the first incision felt like tugging and was unremarkable otherwise. The second incision I felt, as in I felt the whole thing, but I didn't want to thrash for fear of having a larger than planned incision. The doctor noticed I was more tense and asked if I could feel "that". He asked a few more questions to confirm that I had indeed felt the whole damn thing, then he shot me up with so much local that I couldn't feel my thighs.
Actually I'd call bull on this one.
Do not confuse the summary with TFA.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Red hair can be caused by at least for different genes on MC1R Arg151Cys, Arg160Trp, Asp294His, and Arg142His and possibly others on HCL2
And all of these are recessive so non-redhaired people can and often do have them too...
So which are they testing, some of these, a mixture of these ... .. and what against, people without the recessive genes, people with some of the recessive genes ...?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Anecdotal evidence (i.e. my life) would say this is false. But then again that is a very small n.
The carpet does not necessarily match the drapes even on people who don't dye their hair.
Get off my lawn, sonny.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Go easy on him.He missed his homeopathic focusin-variant today.
Mythbusters says redheads have a lower pain tolerance, but the linked article says the opposite. Mythbusters also claims that women have a higher pain tolerance than men, which is not true according to a recent Johns Hopkins study. (Probably the same one this redheads article is based on).
Mythbusters is cool for certain things like "is it possible to do X" but not for statistical things. You need thousands of samples and good controlled environments to determine these kinds of things.
The very title of TFA is, "Redheads feel a different kind of pain"
That, I can probably accept. I can't accept that they have higher pain tolerance. I come from a family with a lot of redheads. I'm a brownheaded guy, who had red mixed in before it all went to gray. (Why does the red turn gray first, long before the brown started going gray?) Some things that bothered the hell out of me, didn't phase my redheaded sisters. Things that bothered them, I didn't even notice. Of course - women have been telling us forever that guys are sissies when we get sick, and that having a baby would kill any of us.
Somehow, I suspect that it would be impossible to establish what "normal" is for any group of people, whether we considered race, complexion, hair color, gender, or whatever.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So if I'm reading this article right, it's actually about the MCR1 gene, which produces melanin in the skin and also interacts with the nervous system. That would imply a very strong correlation with redheads, since they usually don't produce melanin very well, but not a perfect one. Are they just using red hair as a high-correlation classifier for test subjects, when what they really care about is very pale skin?
Anecdotally, my wife has very red hair, but she also tans easily. (I'm the pale one.) Lithuanian and African-American ancestry interacted weirdly. I'd assume she has the normal MCR1 gene.
* No, I didn't have a real point. I'm just seizing the opportunity to brag about having a beautiful red-headed wife.
--Somebody infect me with a
When was the last time you saw a red-haired guy as the HERO in a movie or TV show?
At least one of the Hardy Boys had red hair IIRC (not a TV show or movie, but bonus points for being old), Philip J. Fry, Ichigo Kurosaki, Rorschach was mostly a good guy (he had red hair in the movie at least, dunno about the original comic)....that's just off the top of my head.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Cat colours are due to variations in the womb, not genetic.
No freaking way. I have a cat that has the exact same patterns as her father, down to the same brown spot on the right side of the nose. If it were down to womb conditions and not genes the chance of that happening would be infintescimally small. I can upload pics if you don't believe me.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I call bull on this being a troll. A TENS machine. Really. Come on. This is Grade A pseudoscience.
TENS machines do have legitimate uses.
Redhead ladies get a an automatic +1 on my 1 to 10 scale (yes, some literally turn it up to 11) :D
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
I don't understand how someone came up with the slang "Ginger" for redheads when ginger is yellow and red hair is closer to being or orange or the closer to the color of turmeric.
"they're better than you."
Really? Feeling pain is an evolutionary adaptation to something bad happening to you, like being on fire or being bitten by some creature, which tells a person "take corrective action immediately!" Having less of this "something bad is happening" response might be less annoying in daily life, but it certainly doesn't make one "better." Arguably, it makes one worse off.
Some people cannot feel pain at all, and it leads to a very bad life. Children who cannot feel pain have trouble learning the consequences or risky behavior like falling or touching hot things. I saw a documentary on such a girl once, and she was regularly breaking bones due to her reckless behavior (jumping off of things, etc) and not feeling the pain. He parents had to watch her constantly so she wouldn't injure herself. She'd walk around with a displaced fracture and not even know anything was wrong.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
There's difference between an anecdote and a scientific study.
Then again, you go to a chiropractor. A chiropractor who has a TENS machine.
This subluxation rates a ten.
I'm a red head, and while I've had my share of stupid nicknames ("The Towering Inferno" and "Flame Brain" being a couple of the more neutral examples) the one that I treasure the most was not derived from the color of my hair, but one I picked up when I was in the USAF during the Reagan administration. My fellow combat controllers called me the "Stoic" because of my apparent ability to suck up pain and complete missions. A guy who was a much better warrior than I could ever be gave me this tag -- and I treasure it today. It is interesting to see that my red hair may have had a hand in it. I've always been able to ignore pain and press on. This is anecdotal, I know, but I'll bet a more rigorous analysis might reveal some interesting corroboration for the findings in the study. As I recall, I was not the only red-head in spec ops -- in fact, one SEAL team that we did a joint op with was entirely red-headed. I don't know what the population distribution of red hair is supposed to be, but I'd bet that six guys with the same hair color in a job where ignoring pain is a very good talent to have is probably a significant correlation.
That could still be physical pain, most of what we learn about the world and how to live and behave in it we learn from a very very young age by exploring it, climbing on things. Falling off stuff & getting stung by nettles and your response to that (and your parents, I tend to not make a big deal of it with my kids, encouraging them to brush it off) will absolutely shape your future attitude to risk in general.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
When was the last time you saw a red-haired guy as the HERO in a movie or TV show?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sarYH0z948 YEAAAAAAAHH!!
Kinda makes sense if you think about it.
Nothing like warriors with high pain tolerances to make them effective berserkers.
Now if they could only learn how to drink...
For me, it's not true about feeling more pain; if anything I'd say less. I can eat much spicier food than most, but that took years of conditioning with ever spicier food (finally working up to 5 star Korean), bar be it from me if Mythbusters covered this. My boss is a redhead and so is my one coworker (yeah, it's a bit weird); I asked them about this and they report the same things. Working in IT doesn't really expose us to much pain though OUCH MY FINGERS FROM ALL THIS TYPING!!! Here's a study you might see running across the AP newswire "Report: Redheads are confirmed to have redder hair than Africans"
We went to the same Chiropractor.
Fail
Not necessarily. If you have an actual problem that they fix, then it was worth it, no?
Crooked spine and pelvis... not crooked any more. I can walk/run for extended periods without crippling pain, now. I can actually move my neck around to it's fullest extent without hearing lovely grinding sounds.
Of course, he didn't hook me up to magical machines. He looked at an xray, took some measurements, and did some tweaking, and took some more measurements. Same kind of thing any other doctor would do, I'd expect?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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Maybe he thought it was a Tense Machine. Might have been confused on the phone when he ordered it.
I know a few reds and not a damn one of them can handle anything spicy. Hell, one of them thinks spaghetti sauce is too spicy.
NSFW: Mz Berlin - Kink.com. She is more than a bit enthusiastic about pain, you notice.
It has been my experience in the past 17 years as an RN working in med/surg that "Gingers" experience higher levels of pain and require more pain medications than other patients. Have to admit that none of my patients had capsicum injected into their arms but all had typical medical incisions.
So there's clearly something about MC1R that differentiates pain / killer response; but please stay off the soulless daywalker stuff. It's not helpful and just sounds juvenile.
Firstly, the article is about Gingers, not Daywalkers - so we can't really touch on daywalkers in this post. Secondly - we already know neither Gingers nor Daywalkers have souls - so you bringing it up was actually pretty juvenile and a mechanism to start the debate up again when it has already been settled.
But pleasure, damn... I think it's the hottest Caucasian 'tang! Absolutely bar none.
They use magical thinking. Otherwise they would be a physical therapist or a orthopedic doctor.
That's assuming what you say is actually true. You wouldn't be the first person to go to a chiropractor, be told lies about there spine, and when it got better through normal stretching and exercise claim all the benefit.
Was he an MD? in some states they don't have to be. I man they'll wear a white coat and call themselves Dr.
I'm can legally call my self a Dr. I got an online degree in religious studies. IN fact I can do several magical thinking based 'therapies' Not that I would, just an example how easy it is to get the public to give you credence.
Doesn't make me a MD.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They use magical thinking. Otherwise they would be a physical therapist or a orthopedic doctor.
Well, true enough I suppose.
That's assuming what you say is actually true. You wouldn't be the first person to go to a chiropractor, be told lies about there spine, and when it got better through normal stretching and exercise claim all the benefit.
I've had the "real" doctors notice the problems, and I don't believe a placebo can fix something like that.
Was he an MD? in some states they don't have to be. I man they'll wear a white coat and call themselves Dr.
I'm can legally call my self a Dr. I got an online degree in religious studies. IN fact I can do several magical thinking based 'therapies' Not that I would, just an example how easy it is to get the public to give you credence.
Doesn't make me a MD.
Yea, he's an actual MD... or at least I thought he was. I'll double check next time I'm in the office.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I believe you, but I don't matter! If you do have evidence that the current thinking is wrong, though, I encourage you to contact a local university geneticist who might be able to bring your cats' situation to light of the community. He would be a better judge of the situation than I. You might have some valuable genetic evidence purring around the house!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Follow up comment, see an explanation that I found right here on /. of all places:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=51538&cid=5137772
Attached to this story:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/01/22/0534237/cloned-cat-not-a-carbon-copy
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
But it's still a very very high price to pay for the pleasure of eating a hot curry!
Yea, he's an actual MD... or at least I thought he was. I'll double check next time I'm in the office.
He was, quite probably, a "Doctor of Chiropractic". This is not the same thing as a "Medical Doctor". An MD is board-certified by reputable medical institutions; a DC is certified by a Chiropractic College. They're their own thing, and they don't have to meet any of the standards set by the medical community, which leaves them free to practice whatever quackery they can successfully foist on people.
Note that I'm not saying that Chiropractors can't help in some cases. I recognize that they can, in certain cases, but all-too-often Chiropractic is toted as a cure-all. It's up to the patient to figure out what percentage of it is pure hogwash, and what may actually help them.