It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (But Were Never Told)

by Karen Tang

This word, hysteria, contains all the judgments and assumptions about female bodies that have existed for thousands of years. It suggests that women’s distressing physical symptoms stem from a combination of anxiety, mental or neurologic weakness, and broken uteri, rather than from not-yet-understood medical conditions.

It’s hard to imagine a non-gynecologic medical scenario where physicians would tell competent adult patients that they don’t actually know their goals and therefore can’t make decisions about their health.

Black patients are consistently undertreated for pain; they receive less pain medication than white patients do for objectively painful conditions such as broken bones and appendicitis.

A 2016 study showed that half of the medical students and residents polled believed that Black people had less sensitive nerve endings, thicker skin, and lower perception of pain than white people, which has no basis in scientific fact.

Black women also endure markedly elevated rates of maternal mortality. In the United States, they are three times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or childbirth, even after accounting for factors such as income, education level, insurance coverage, and prenatal care. This statistic goes up in the UK to four times more likely.

it wasn’t until 1993 that President Clinton signed an act mandating that NIH-funded human research projects must include women and racial minorities.