It's official; there is a difference between the sexes. Not only do women never look good with a moustache, they also feel pain more than men and cope with it less well. The Chronic Pain Policy Coalition says so. So let's hear no more guff about women being designed to endure the pain of childbirth or any disparaging remarks about blokes with common colds pretending to have “man flu”. Our pain is real, do you hear? Real.

The coalition's spokeswoman also insisted that GPs haven't noticed that men and women behave differently. And that has given me a proper headache.

There are at least a dozen important things that a patient can tell me about their pain. Getting these details from a man is like pulling teeth, but a woman can sit down and rattle them off without so much as a pause for breath.

She can tell me where it hurts, when it hurts, what brings it on, what makes it worse, how long it lasts and what makes it better. These diagnostic clues whizz past so quickly that I barely have time to write them down. But asking a man to describe the pain he's in is a complete waste of time. Men simply don't have the vocabulary and I have to resort to putting words in their mouths.

“Would you say it was a sharp, stabbing pain or is it more like a dull ache? Does it build up and then fade away, or is it pretty constant? How about when you move; does that makes it worse or better?” “I dunno Doc, but I'll tell you one thing ...” and here he will pause for effect as if he was about to divulge the combination for the bullion vault at the Bank of England, “it hurts like hell”.

When faced with a bloke in pain it's usually better to ignore the words and check out his body language. Pointing to where it hurts with a single finger is manspeak for “sharp and stabbing”. Waving the palm of the hand over the abdomen means “stomach cramps” and clutching a fist over the chest means “it's not really indigestion and I should have dialled 999”.

Brain scans show that when men are in pain the area concerned with analysis and problem-solving is the most active. When women are subjected to the same painful stimulus - usually having their arm stuck in a bucket of iced water - it's the limbic system, the part of the brain concerned with emotional responses, that kicks into overdrive.

When men are asked to forget how annoyed they feel about being in pain and to focus more on the unpleasant sensation itself, their level of pain reduces. This doesn't happen in women; it's as if they can't divorce the emotional from the physical aspects of discomfort.

Consider these real world examples, two painful conditions with no apparent physical cause - fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome. Both are much more common in women than men and don't get better if treated with standard painkillers. But they often improve if the patient is treated with an antidepressant.

Drugs such as ibuprofen and paracetamol are said to be less effective for women, not because they work differently in men but because they have no effect on the psychological aspect of pain.

Men don't have it all their own way. A woman is three times more likely to have her recurring headache correctly diagnosed as migraine and treated appropriately. However, migraine is diagnosed by listening carefully to the patient's description of their symptoms.

A chimpanzee with a clipboard could get the classic history of a one-sided thumping pain, triggered by stress, tiredness or caffeine, accompanied by nausea and preceded by a bit of visual blurring, from a woman. All it would get from a bloke with the same headache would be, “I'll tell you one thing, Cheetah. It hurts like crazy.”

Things might improve after some aspirin and a nap in a quiet dark room. For the chimp at least.

Dr Copperfield is an Essex GP. He also writes fro Pulse magazine and pulsetoday.co.uk

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