Have you ever joked about how your redheaded friends are different from you? Well, that’s not just a joke anymore! Redheaded people have been proven to react differently to anesthesia causing them to need more of it and having either a higher or lower pain tolerance to meds than the average person.
Most of the time when people get medicine from a doctor they feel better afterward but with “gingers” the meds either don’t work as well or they need a lower dosage due to the meds working too well. UCLA Health reported that the medications affected are the ones that help with pain control. When anesthesiologists were asked they said they found that “women with red hair required up to 20% more anesthesia to keep them sedated than women with dark hair.”
Before you start making even more fun of your redheaded friends just know that they have no control over the effect pain meds have on them. The pain relief issue has been proven to stem from the Mc1r or melanocortin-1 receptor gene. This is the gene that helps determine the color of a person’s skin from the “two forms of melanin” it produces. In this case, when there is more pheomelanin the person will have “red or blond hair, freckles, and light-colored skin that tans poorly” as explained by MedlinePlus and its responses not only affect skin and hair color but it is responsible for changing a person’s immune system.
If you have red hair make sure that for anything healthcare related the worker knows that you are a natural redhead not one with artificially dyed red hair because this may change the doctor’s course of treatment. The differences in pain may be slight for some and big for others, but over time with studies from mice and people the extensive knowledge of just how different the pain threshold is increases every day. For one, the Keck School of Medicine did a study that found that when a subject had red hair and experienced chronic pain “they are likely experiencing the intensity of it differently than others who have different hair colors” on both sides of the pain spectrum where some have a higher pain threshold while others have a lower one.
Studies previously done have come up with conflicting results regarding exactly how pain tolerance is affected from a higher to lower tolerance and everything in between. The only thing that can be agreed on by the scientists is that red-headed people are affected differently in some way when it comes to meds. Consider asking yourself, whether it’s about you or someone you know, where the ones with the rarest natural hair type fall on the pain spectrum.
