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

by Maya Dusenbery

At this point, women seem to be caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the collective level, since medicine has failed to explain many of our symptoms, women are, in reality, more likely to have “medically unexplained symptoms”—whether those symptoms are side effects of drugs that haven’t been tested in women, or atypical symptoms of diseases that have been largely studied in men, or symptoms of functional somatic syndromes that are more common among women and that medicine, assuming they must be psychogenic, has hardly researched at all. And since the tendency to see any “medically unexplained symptoms” as psychogenic has become deeply entrenched in medicine, this knowledge gap creates the stereotype that women are hysterics and hypochondriacs with a tendency to somatize. This stereotype, in turn, affects how all women patients—whether their symptoms are explained or unexplained—are perceived when they enter the medical system. Profiling them as patients prone to “medically unexplained symptoms,” doctors more quickly settle on the conclusion that women’s symptoms are “just stress,” offering antidepressants instead of doing a more thorough workup to find a medical explanation, which just exacerbates this endless cycle.