The Pain of Being a Redhead

It’s amazing how many biochemical changes in the body can result from a mutation in a single gene. In this case, it can produce not only red hair, light skin and resistance to anesthesia and painkillers, but it can also produce freckles, an increased risk of certain types of skin cancer and if what I read was true, a slight increase in IQ.

Still, what difference does it make? After all, we’re all the same! If you don’t believe me, just ask any leftist.

This is true. As a redhead with exceptionally fire-truck red hair I can attest to the truth of this statement, and so could my dentist and my doctor! In addition to needing MORE anesthetic, many local anesthetics are less effective on redheads.

I’m a redhead and I don’t have a problem with Novacaine or any other pain medication. I think it applies more to carrot tops than titian hair like mine. My skin is a shade darker than both my blue-eyed blonde sisters’ although I am still on the fairer side. My skin is also more even toned than theirs and I don’t have the freckles that carrot tops have.

Interesting. If this is the case, then is there a slightly higher occurrence of the disease that causes people to still feel pain during their surgery despite sedation?

My sig-o is a redhead,and she’s commented for years she needs an increased dosage of any sort of painkiller before she notices any effect. She isn’t quite a carrot top,but shes definitely a redhead-not a strawberry blonde,not auburn haired,either.

Now having said that,is there also a tendency for redheads to feel pain more than those of us who aren’t redheaded? I ask in all seriousness,because I’ve watched this for years-a minor muscle ache or a relatively minor bruise (minor by my standards,at least),or sunburn will send the sig-o running for the pill bottle,and after a number of years of watching,I really don’t think she’s faking it.

She really is in pretty severe pain,at least by her standards.

Am now curious-is there any objective measuring system,or really any way at all to qualify pain? I have no idea-it would seem there would be,though.

Titian redhead from 6:54 p.m. —

Don’t you have a third sister with hair much like yours and a few more freckles? You could ask her about the issue with Novocaine and then be able to generalize beyond your own experience.

I think the point of the article is that even subtle differences within races have some profound outcomes; so that those who maintain that race is merely a social construct are bound to be exposed as frauds.

I’m a brown-eyed brunette with a golden, slightly dark skin tone and I had a C-section when giving birth to my son. I could still slightly feel that scalpel. *shudder* Just slightly. I had to inhale more of that gas or whatever.

No redheads in my immediate family, either. Just colors ranging from blue-eyed blond to brown-eyed brunette.

As a freckle-faced strawberry, I can attest to the fact that novacaine doesn’t work as well on me. Once the dentist gave me seven shots of it, and I still felt the pain So, basically, I have learned to grin and bear it.

Interesting. I happen to be a blonde myself and painkillers work normally on me the first time they’re used. After that, almost no effect at all unless I wait a week or so. This trait even runs in the family, as I found out when my father asked me why hydrocodone had a fleeting effect on him.

Interesting…I have reddish hair and green eyes. Novacaine has never worked that well on me.

Blond here, also, but most of the family is red-headed. It’s not only novacaine that doesn’t work on me, and us, it’s anything in the “caine” family. I think that’s probably why we never got into drugs-cocaine, doesn’t do anything either.

At least half of the true redhead females I see are paired with black males. I wonder if this pain resistance is experienced by the biracial offspring of such unions?

#9—That is one reason why I seldom use painkillers unless I am desperate (other than the possibility for liver damage). If I use them every time I get a headache, their effectiveness decreases. If I use them maybe once every few months, then they work fine.

And as I said earlier, no redheads or anything in my family that I know of.

As a Redhead (mid-30s) with chronic back pain I can honestly tell you that most medications, Naproxen, Hydrocodone, etc… Really don’t help me as doctors prescribe.

This, however, is not to say that we can’t handle pain. We just need a high dosage of medicine. It took incontinence before I was forced to do something about it.

Straying off the subject only slightly, I would like to make the observation, having had several relationships, personal and business with redheads, inlcuding my wife of ten years. Hard is this is to generalize about, I believe as one training in neurology and neurophysiology that this syndrome is not limited to physical pain. There is a sensitivity that often comes with this gene that can show up as a seeming personality trait; quick to upset, quickt to anger - in other words, high-strung. The fairest of the “Fair Maids,” the most high of all princesses; the generalization about the female Irish redhead has long been almost a pejorative term, even showing up in films like “The Quiet Man,” with our dear Maureen O’Hara as the high-strung, but irreplaceble, Irish Redhead. I love them and I am sad to see every time that things go wrong for them. And they often do, I think that they are particularly vulnerable to being picked off by non-White men because they often learn some sort of shame wherever they are rare, and at the hands of whites. In a world that is running down, the finest go first, and so they become rarer, now even in Ireland. The Redhead is “the canary in the coal mine.”

If this is the case, then is there a slightly higher occurrence of the disease that causes people to still feel pain during their surgery despite sedation?

Meant to say, “is there a slightly higher occurrence among read heads of the disease…”

And another condition that should be looked into is the one in which the person feels no pain whatsoever.

I come from a family of red-headed Scots (I am blonde). When I was a child, my mother took me from dentist to dentist because I was such a terrible patient—I kept screaming in pain because no amount of novocaine would numb me. One dentist wouldn’t work on me unless I took a heavy-duty sedative before I entered his office, another demanded that I be ‘gassed.’ One dentist yelled at me to ‘stop acting like such a child!’ Well, I was a child at the time— it seemed none of the dentists believed me. Did they think I was faking the excruciating pain?

I finally had such a hysterical fit during one dental session that the dentist retrieved my mother and told her he would no longer work on me. How would you like to be drilled right on the teeth without any novocaine? Well, that’s what it was like for me. I have a feeling my father had the same issue—he’d tell the dentist to go ahead and drill, no anesthesia. I wasn’t such a stoic Scot as he.

Finally, we found a patient children’s dentist who agreed to give me as much anesthesia as it took to finally get my teeth in order—the amount I need is an un-Godly number of shots including several right in the hard palette—by then, my entire head is completely numb and I’m numb halfway down my chest. Today, that dentist’s daughter is my and my children’s dentist.

And, because of this I am meticulous about keeping my teeth clean because I despise having to deal with anesthesia, it doesn’t seem to work well for me—and few believe this.

Bon

“At least half of the true redhead females I see are paired with black males. I wonder if this pain resistance is experienced by the biracial offspring of such unions?”

There’s one on every…single…thread!

My brother is a brunette but he has a reddish beard and blue eyes and yes, he hates to go to the dentist, too.

We have no redheads in the family. I am a swarthy brown eyed brunette, typical Southern European type. Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles include every type, ranging from ash blond to almost black.

Amazing I thought I was the only one! I have a high pain tolerance but getting a tooth drilled left me in pain. I require a high dosage of novacane but that usually takes care of it. I only go to dentist that gives gas also and have noticed aspirin has little effect on me. Naproxen works the best. But, I have light brown hair (what is left). But my paternal grandfather was nicknamed red.

12 — Anonymous wrote at 1:44 PM on August 15:

“At least half of the true redhead females I see are paired with black males. I wonder if this pain resistance is experienced by the biracial offspring of such unions?”

I think this relates to what I wrote in my first post (rife as it was with tech errors, oops). Redheads, especially in the U.S. have often grown up being teased, so they end up hating their red hair. Redhead might be a sort of first-wave of Whites who were made to hate what they are. Even Nicole Kidman, a spectacular redhead, died her hair blonde. This, I believe is why they so often pair up with blacks, who just love exploiting any vulnerability in any white female - after all, they get to do Scarlet O’Hara!

But the resulting projeny is often not so spectacular. I recall one episode some time back, when I observed a Redhead in a diner, alone with three mixed race offspring. They were hideous looking and her shame was obviously doubled. Of course, she bore it like a battle scar with typical Redhaired bravado tinged with vainglorious resentment.

Something must be said about male redheads. My own ancestors were Normans and I know that many of them were redheads. My earliest 10th century ancestor had his first name followed by “the Red,” which became a surname in another language. Genealogically, the Normans were a combination of Viking Norwegians, German Franks and local Celts. According to history books such as “The Norman People,” this particular ethnic group were the most vibrant and forward of all adventurers and conquerors, filling most of the ranks of the early Crusades, making conquests in Anatolia, Sicily and southern Italy, even most probably landed and settled in New Foundland a hundred years before Columbus. Their conquering and ordering of Britain carried that island nation to empire and beyond; for the settling and expansion in North America is largely credited to the Norman momentum and ancestry, as is Australia, and all of the English speaking world.

We may simply review the faces on the death lists of military volunteers; the ones who actually become engaged in combat, and see the redhead show up often. And has anyone forgotten the most decorated hero of WW2, Audie Murphy? The eventual loss of the glorious species - perhaps the most genetically advanced of all people, including other whites, will be a loss to all humankind.

I have no doubt that as multi-culturalism and the drive towards “diversity” continues, the human race is overall devolving.

I am a redheaded male and I need extra shots of “novacaine” when I have a tooth fixed. I am nearing 50yrs of age and my hips have started bothering me recently. I find that Vicodin doesn’t seem to help much with them either.

“It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity.” - quote from GULLIVER’S TRAVELS (Part 4: ‘A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’) by Jonathan Swift