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February 21 - February 28, 2022
According to a survey by the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA), it takes nearly four years and four doctors, on average, before a patient with an autoimmune disease is properly diagnosed. Nearly half report that before they were diagnosed, they were dismissed as “chronic complainers” who were overly concerned with their health.
we are still feeling the legacy of years of foundational research conducted on men, with the assumption that it could be extrapolated to women.
fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight;
the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.
cure-alls.
Cure-alls cure nothing.
She is out of her proper sphere’ because they are afraid they will be pushed out of places they are not fit to fill;
This book, then, is not about a few sexist bad apples within the medical profession. It is about how bias is embedded into the system.
Millions of women in this country literally cannot afford for the medical system to be this bad at caring for them.
black women are nearly four times as likely as white women to die in childbirth.
An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University that looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn’t enroll a single woman.
What???
In fact, there were only three gynecologists on staff at the NIH, compared to thirty-nine veterinarians.
Dr. J. Marion Sims, known as the “father of modern gynecology,” developed a groundbreaking cure for fistulas by practicing the surgery on enslaved women, whom he purchased specifically for that purpose, and later on poor Irish immigrants.
He experimented on enslaved women who couldn't give consent. And did so without anesthetic. Why do we not treat this man the same way we treat Joseph Mengele?
we have an explanation for that one: according to the researchers, they enrolled only men because there wasn’t a women’s bathroom at the research site.)
I have lost track of how many times I've said "are you f'ing kidding me?" while reading already...
Women more commonly do not have any chest pain when experiencing a heart attack.
EVERY WOMAN NEEDS TO KNOW THIS!
if the results of the study do vary significantly due to fluctuations in ovarian hormones, that’s just all the more reason females need to be studied, no matter the cost.
It’s true: a human woman is definitely not a female mouse. But then, she’s not a male mouse either.
Women’s Health Care: Activist Traditions and Institutional Change
some of the most urgent feminist battles have been over women’s ability to speak to the conditions of their own lives.
The uterine-nerve theory of hysteria proved especially useful for keeping women in their proper place; one might even suspect it was designed to.
One might...
Putting a Name to It: Diagnosis in Contemporary Society,
The American Academy of Family Physicians, for example, advises doctors to consider the possibility of a somatoform disorder “early in the evaluation process” in order to limit “unnecessary diagnostic and medical treatments.”
the single biggest factor that increased the likelihood of misdiagnosis was if the physician felt the interaction with the patient had been negative.
We have to be "perfect" patients.
“WOMEN’S ILLNESSES ARE ASSUMED PSYCHOSOMATIC UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE”
That's it, that's the whole book.
Authors of Our Own Misfortune? The Problems with Psychogenic Explanations for Physical Illnesses,
She adds, “I’m troubled by the fact that a cancer diagnosis almost felt like good news because it validated the more mysterious symptoms and made me feel less ‘crazy.’”
How Doctors Think
“The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian
(For example, women tend to wait longer than men to get help when they’re having a heart attack.)
This is probably because the women don't know that they're having a heart attack. Symptoms present differently in women than in men. We are only ever told to look for the classic chest pain shooting down the left arm, and women's heart attacks tend to come with more back pain and nausea.
Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
My Imaginary Illness: A Journey into Uncertainty and Prejudice in Medical Diagnosis.
Instead of my illness being the problem, I became the problem.”
Again, that's this whole book
One of the few exceptions to that rule: among the patients judged to have an intermediate risk, the women were significantly more likely than the men to be advised to lose weight.
Shocking...
But women, premenopausal women especially, are more likely to have other “atypical” symptoms during a heart attack and often in the days or even weeks leading up to it: pain in the neck, throat, shoulder, or upper back; abdominal discomfort; shortness of breath; nausea or vomiting; sweating, anxiety, or a sense of impending doom; light-headedness or dizziness; and unusual fatigue or insomnia.
EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW THIS.
“Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress.”
In fact, a healthy dose of anxiety had saved her life.
Here, finally, were those mythical “hysterical females” coming into the ER: the millions of mostly women patients—perhaps 3 million in the United States, by the WISE researchers’ estimate—who have heart disease and all its symptoms but have, for decades, been told that they do not.
“It’s a little bit like ‘no women need apply.’”
In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America,
But, of course, that requires listening to, and trusting, the patient’s report of her symptoms. And that seems to be part of the problem here.
A Nation in Pain: Healing Our Biggest Health Problem,
All in My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache,
Tender Points,
Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health
The Makings of a Modern Epidemic: Endometriosis, Gender and Politics
“My doctor told me having a baby would help my pain. I’m only eleven.”
(I, for one, am somewhat less surprised that women’s genital pain wasn’t a top priority for male doctors in the Victorian era.)
proponents of the psychogenic explanations of vulvodynia tended to simply incorporate patients’ adamant rejection of their theory into the psychopathological profile of the disorder.
Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do About It.
Being constantly lectured about their weight only makes women reluctant to see a doctor for preventive care—and even sometimes for acute problems.
No shit
