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

by Maya Dusenbery

Second, there is a trust gap: women’s accounts of their symptoms are too often not believed. For centuries, Western medicine tended to throw many of women’s inexplicable symptoms into the catchall diagnostic category of hysteria. The explanation offered for this mystery female malady shifted over the centuries, but at the end of the nineteenth century, hysteria came to be seen as a psychological problem. 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. The terminology has morphed—from hysteria to somatization and conversion disorders to “medically unexplained symptoms”—but the idea has remained remarkably unchanged. And the idea that women are especially prone to such psychogenic symptoms has endured too. In other words, a stereotype that women’s symptoms are likely to be “all in their heads” has been hard baked into medical knowledge itself.