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May 29 - August 13, 2018
For much of Western history, caring for the sick and dying has been women’s work. Women were respected healers in ancient times, but their standing declined in Europe during the Middle Ages and early modern period as university-trained male physicians gradually turned medicine into an elite occupation among the wealthy.
To say that the herbal remedies and received wisdom based on centuries of observation that female lay healers offered were superior to the methods of the regular doctors (which became known as “heroic medicine”) is an understatement.
The regular doctors had finally gained a legal monopoly over the practice of medicine, and in the process created a profession that was overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy.
There remain large segments of medicine where women are vastly outnumbered: women make up about a quarter of emergency medicine physicians, neurologists, and anesthesiologists; less than 20 percent of general surgeons; 12 percent of cardiologists; 7 percent of urologists; and less than 5 percent of orthopedic surgeons.
The people making the key decisions about where funding and resources go, what gets taught to the next generation of doctors, and who is hired and promoted are still overwhelmingly white men.
Ever since, a medical profession that increasingly understands the underlying cause of many diseases—and can objectively confirm patients’ reported symptoms with blood tests and high-tech scans—has tended to attribute to “the mind” any that it can’t see and explain.
Women’s symptoms are not taken seriously because medicine doesn’t know as much about their bodies and health problems. And medicine doesn’t know as much about their bodies and health problems because it doesn’t take their symptoms seriously.
They’re no longer allowed to charge women higher premiums than men for the same coverage simply because they’re women, a practice known as “gender rating” common in the pre-Obamacare days.
A quarter of women, regardless of income, reported that a reason they went without health care was that they simply didn’t have time to go to the doctor.
Women make up a majority of workers in low-wage and part-time jobs that often don’t provide sick days.
On the other hand, for many women, their tenuous connection to the medical system just compounds the problems discussed in this book.
“I think, finally, it is in the increased attention paid to women, and especially in their new function as lucrative patients, scarily imagined a hundred years ago, that we find explanation for much of the ill-health among women, freshly discovered today.”
In a remarkably lucky boon to the new medical profession, it was only those women who had the time and the money to be treated who were prone to perpetual illness and in need of their services. And it was only women trying to push into professional work—those aspiring bacteriologists, histologists, and surgeons—who faced such dire health consequences from working.
Since women are expected to have an overly emotional response to pain, they are at risk of having their reports not taken seriously whether they adhere to the stereotype or break with it.
among the patients judged to have an intermediate risk, the women were significantly more likely than the men to be advised to lose weight.
After all, all pain is literally all in your head. Though it certainly feels as though it’s your hand that hurts when you burn it on a hot pan, your hand is not capable of hurting; pain becomes pain only in the brain.
And this perception is right: studies have found that health care providers have a strong “beautiful is healthy” bias, especially when it comes to women.
A 1996 study found that patients judged “attractive” were perceived by their doctors to be experiencing less pain, a finding that held only for the female patients.
A 2011 study found that, on average, American medical students get just five hours of education on LGBT-related topics during medical school.
