Redheads feel your pain. And then some.
I got this tidbit, the wackiest medical trivia of my life, a couple years ago from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. I was there real shortly after another doc told me in scary tones that a weird bump could be something awful and had to be dealt with post-haste. Spoiler alert: Turned out fine. Sometimes a bump is just a bump. But before removing it, the specialist asked a question unlike any I’d ever gotten from a doctor.
See, I must’ve flinched more than the Hopkins doc thought I should when she commenced to burn my flesh, because she stopped the procedure to ask, “Did you used to be a redhead?”
I wasn’t sure she was on the level at first. But, this was Johns damn Hopkins, and, reading the room, I took it seriously: Yes, I said, I had red hair out of the womb and for the first several decades of my life, though by the time I got to Hopkins any visual evidence of my ginger history was long gone.
“Anaesthesia doesn’t always work on redheads,” she responded.
For real? Yup. She said that her experience had been that redheads do not respond to pain medication like all others. She wasn’t sure why that was, just that it was.
How crazy is that?
I was intrigued in the moment for sure, but I got out of there without more flinching and without the formerly troubling bump and my takeaway from the day was that I wasn’t closer to dying than when I went in. So I moved on with my life without exploring the coif color quandary.
Then about a year ago I was at the dentist for a nasty wisdom tooth pulled a few decades too late, and about to get some local pain shots when somebody on the extraction team asked if I was a redhead. I mean, again with the wacky question? I was there to get a tooth pulled, not my leg! But the dentist said she was sincerely interested, and echoed the Hopkins doc in saying that her experience was that redheads deal differently with pain but she didn’t know why, and adding that the disparity is common knowledge to everybody in the pain biz. Thankfully, she came up with enough of whatever was needed for my ex-real-redhead ass to feel nothing when they yanked the bad tooth out.
But this time, when it was over, I surfed the net some to see if redheads really feel more pain. Conclusion: Hell if we don’t! At least according to lots of medical folks.
The American Dental Association journal, for example, had an anesthesia researcher named Daniel Sessler saying: “Red hair is the only physical characteristic that indicates how much anesthetic a person needs. Redheads report more pain during procedures.” The ADA report added that studies have shown that red haired patients “are more resistant to local anesthetics.”
“And they may need more general anesthesia to keep them sleeping during medical procedures," said the ADA report.
And anybody looking for some light beach reading could surf on over to the white paper published by the National Institutes of Health titled, “Increased sensitivity to thermal pain and reduced subcutaneous lidocaine efficacy in redheads.” TL;DR: hot and cold things hurt redheads more than your non-ginger ass after getting shot up with the same amount of the most common painkiller. Another study with only female participants in the NIH database found that real red hair was “significantly linked to higher levels of dental anxiety.”
These reports and others with similar findings were revelatory to me. Here I’d gone through life thinking I was just a wuss! Nah, I’m just a redhead! Turns out the “redheaded stepchild” really does have it rough! Me too! Now I’m looking for studies that find left-handed people are doomed to being tubby and unmotivated! Then I can go all Sydney Sweeney in Oppositeland and pin it all on my genes!
There are, alas, smarty pants folks who want to pee on my self-pity party. The Mayo Clinic’s news service ran an essay on redheads and pain in 2024 that used hi-falutin’ phrases like “melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) gene codes for the MC1R protein” to explain how me and less than two percent of the population ended up with red hair, and quoted a medical researcher saying studies she’d reviewed showed “red-haired people … having less pain.”
But, much like my Hopkins doc and dentist, even the Mayo Clinic admits something’s up with redheads and hurting and can’t explain why.
“There’s a lot we don’t yet know about redheads and pain,” said the MC’s report.
On that we can agree to agree, Mayo naysayers. But for now I’m not taking any chances. I’ve got to go back to the dentist at the end of the week and I’ve already been told the best case scenario is I’m not leaving without some drilling. I’ll bring some old photos.
Make mine a double, doc.
