Hurts Worse on My Left and Hers Too, Why?

Pretty Mum

When it comes to endometriosis physicians have never exactly linked the quality and extent of pelvic pain to the extent or location of the disease. There just seems to be little correlation other than in the most broad terms. Severe endometriosis is more associated with very infertile, but not very associated with very painful. Who gets the condition, why they get the condition is something that in addition, seems to be a question we cannot firmly answer. One fact that physicians have been puzzling over as of late: more women will have endometriosis in the left than in the right side of the pelvis. And though pain and endo spots don't always match up, they actually often do. The location on the left side for the implants is the same overall locations as where we do find right sided endometriosis: behind the uterus, on the ovary, on the ligaments surrounding the uterus or the ligaments to the ovary, but there tend to be more on the left, thus corrolating with more left sided pain. Oddly these are not often spots we see at all. We have always known about spots too small to see but what is coming more clear are spots we haven't looked for very often, endometriosis in the lymph nodes of the pelvis are said to be involved in up to one third of cases in a recent review by Dr. Bedalway and Lui at Case Western Reserve University which is a relatively new claim. Thus based on statistics that do not involve the sampling of nodes in the majority of early cases we have said that spots don't add up to pain. So gynos have been told to be cautious about this well worn theory, as older statistics didn't account for pain in the lymph glands. If we were more reliably able to score the endo we might find the pain scores and the extent of the disease aligning more closely. Drs. Bedlway and Lui have an explanation for the left sided endo; they think that the turn of the lower most portion of the colon, the sigmoid colon, to the left may disrupt fluid movements through the left of the pelvis. Women ovulate more on their right than on their left, but I’ve not seen proposals that propose these two facts are directly related. It always seemed to me that the ovulation process would recruit the “clean up” cell crew effectively in that area, so perhaps that would clean up the traces of endometriosis or the origins of the endometriosis more effectively on that side. But these are just gyno guesses awaiting more study to back them up.