I've been in almost constant pain for the past decade or so. NSAIDs are worthless; if I'm on a dose that touches my pain, my liver bloodwork goes haywire. If I take enough opiates to make the pain go away, I'm stupid and nauseous all day. I get by with a combo of low dose codeine and cannabis; while neither really works well alone, together they keep me comfortable enough without terrible side effects. I'm finding that my opiate dose hasn't gone up over time, either, so that's a bonus. And the cannabis helps with the despair that can come with constant pain. I really wish there were more quality studies on this combo for women with chronic pain; oh, and it would also be nice if I didn't risk prison time for keeping myself a little more comfy.

The bottom line is that we don't know as much about women's biology

AHEM speaking of which... that's also true of whoever happens to be floating the hypotheses mentioned in this article. Specifically this one •________•...

Estrogen, which women produce more of than men, slows stomach emptying, increases body-fat ratio, and reduces the amount of certain drug-binding proteins in blood plasma—all of which research shows affects how medications are distributed and broken down in the body.

...where the boldface part is just flat-out wrong from Menopause onwards.

On average, post-Menopausal Women's estrogen levels are 20-30% lower than same-age men's—and with relatively low variance within each sex, meaning that a randomly chosen post-Menopausal Woman will be overwhelmingly likely to have significantly lower estrogen levels than a randomly chosen man Her age. (Which BTW is why osteopenia and osteoporosis are predominantly Female issues; higher estrogen levels—which men have later in life—protect against bone loss.)

So um yeah, this hypothesis is utter lizardfeathers—unless painkillers secretly become MORE effective for Women after Menopause (an age bracket that almost certainly includes a solid majority of frequent users of painkillers!) and the author just kinda like... forgot to tell us that part.

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Women’s immune systems are also more active compared to men’s

More likely to be this one.

Virtually all of the genome for immune response is on the X chromosome(s), so that the average Woman's immune system overall is, literally, twice as rich a mosaic as the average man's.

This is the fundamental basis for the whole wide range of immunity-related sex differences, including those that favor Women (e.g., Women are substantially more likely to survive—and take less time on average to recover from—major accidents or high-level physical trauma, and are far less likely to die from severe illness than, same-age men) as well as those that go the other way (e.g., Women are 2-3 times as likely to suffer from conditions caused by an OVERactive immune system—asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases, etc).

So, sure, this one would actually make sense. Glad at least something here is actual science.

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Research shows that girls, women, and people assigned female at birth feel more severe pain than men, and are more likely to experience chronic conditions such as migraine, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, and osteoarthritis

​#ByTheirOwnPetard here: The boldface part accidentally includes all the "trans women".

Gotta love how even the most zealous practitioners of this bullshit can't keep their own bullshit straight.

The only painkiller that works for me is sadly chocolate, lol.

i always considered things like ibuprofen or aspirin or benadryl to be “fake medicine” that i take anyway even though they don’t really do much of anything

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