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

by Maya Dusenbery

Intrigued by Jessop’s description of her patients and her hypothesis that an unknown infectious agent, perhaps a new retrovirus like HIV, was affecting their immune systems, he asked her to send over some patients to his lab and said he’d start searching their blood for viruses. But after seeing the first several patients, he started to balk. Suspecting what the problem might be, Jessop sent over one of her male patients with the condition next. “[He] saw ten women, and he thought they were all hysterical,” she explained, “then he saw a man, whose complaints he took seriously.” This is not to say that men with ME/CFS haven’t been dismissed and labeled as psychiatric cases or malingerers; they certainly have. Insist on being sick for long enough without explanation, and anyone will be at risk of being disbelieved. But, as with chronic pain, doctors seemed to find it far easier to ascribe ME/CFS to the mind in women. A 1996 Australian study of fifty patients eventually diagnosed with ME/CFS, for example, found that 85 percent of the women, compared to 30 percent of the men, had received psychiatric diagnoses during their search for an explanation. “Their expressed emotion or signs of distress appear to have influenced the diagnosis regardless of other symptoms,” the authors wrote. “In contrast, men’s accounts of their symptoms and their choices about treatment were usually given credence.” In fact, trusting in the reality of the men’s complaints, doctors had sometimes ignore...