Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

by Maya Dusenbery

It seems that these stereotypes may drive us all to a similar spot: in attempting to adhere to the stoic male stereotype, men may hesitate to get the care they need; in attempting to avoid playing into the hypochondriacal female stereotype, women may do the same. Indeed, when it comes to studies that look at what patients actually do, women are not, as a general rule, any quicker to seek medical care. There is relatively little research that has explored whether men and women with the same condition or the same similarly debilitating symptom differ in whether and how quickly they seek medical care, and the research that does exist has yielded mixed results: for some conditions, gender isn’t a factor; for others, men delay longer; and for others, women do. (For example, women tend to wait longer than men to get help when they’re having a heart attack.) As Hunt and her colleagues concluded in a 2011 review of studies on help-seeking for two common symptoms—headache and back pain—the evidence that women sought medical attention more readily than men was, given the strength of the stereotype, “surprisingly weak and inconsistent.” But, again, even if women were, on average, more willing to seek medical attention than men are, it wouldn’t justify not taking their symptoms seriously when they do.