A friend has asked me to post this and I thoroughly agree that this is an important issue affecting women in particular. People with M.E. may remember that one of the reasons given by McEvedy and Beard for the ‘hysterical’ nature of M.E. in their 1955 report on the Royal Free outbreak was ‘the high attack rate in females compared to males’. This post has some interesting info on the role played in this issue more recently by Professor Sir Simon Wessely.
On International Women’s Day, let’s remember that thousands of UK patients, especially women, are being diagnosed with medically unexplained symptoms or ‘MUS ‘, denied biomedical care and shipped off to psychological therapies instead. Those who wind up in the ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ or ‘IAPT ‘ programme will all be coded with ‘somatization disorder’.