Book due out: "Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery"

I am not surprised in times of 'Lightning Process', positive thinking and guidelines that emphasize psychosocial viewpoints.

 

I certainly never claimed that old men would be better at cautionary tales than old ladies. However, each would specialise in different cautionary tales, both types of which would be important. The old ladies could advise about not getting too close to the fire, being careful with hot water, and not losing your virtue to the first young hunter to shake a spear at you. My advice would concentrate mainly on hunting matters, where the old ladies would have no experience, such as which sleeping animals not to prod with a stick, and on a 3-day trek which spiders are safe to eat and which leaves you can wipe your bottom with.

I quite agree that old ladies are good for as long as they are able to pound corn, and would like to include that valuable contribution in my forthcoming paper. Would you consider joint authorship?

 

I think a doctor, if wrongly dismissive for whatever reason, might be more likely to take a patient seriously if there is a second person of any gender supporting what the patient says.

I can cite examples from my family where a woman accompanying the patient has made a vital difference (i.e. no one died!). One of the patients was a man. In both cases the doctor concerned was dismissing a serious health problem as psychological.

 

Tell that to Einstein, old man.

 

These topics seem to provide evidence as to why leaving gender bias out of M.E is a good idea. A fight of some sort always ensues.

I don’t think it helps any of us.

 

Yeats got there first.

 

Behind every great old cave man sharing his wisdom is an old cave woman rolling her eyes..

 

Er, one could. Sadly, Einstein made virtually no contribution to science after his early papers. He spent decades trying to prove quantum theory was wrong. And in his final years he realised how much time he had wasted and that he was wrong.

 

Yes, exactly, but it's partly because men never quite got the eye rolling trick.

 

Oh come now, it's great fun. As long as we keep our tongues in our cheeks.

 

I was thinking of something a bit like that. Whenever I have been seriously ill (cancer and stuff) I have benefited greatly from having my wife present scaring the pants off the doctor with difficult and pertinent questions.

 

We could do one of those papers with seventy three main authors and a subsidiary list of six hundred minor authors. We would need to make sure 55% of them were women though, to avoid flack.

 

And don't forget to propose two conflicting hypothesis, you know just to cover all bases.

 

I'll thank you not to refer to my wife in such terms again.

 

Tired Sam can cover the adjudicating property disputes, I can cover the fact that they probably had no idea of an abstract thing called property.

We might both agree on possession being a real concept for them though. So we'll need someone to argue against it.

 

Yeesss ... the ladies do seem to have a special way with it. It's a complete body language thing.

 

It's all a bit daft talking about such large groups of people in such generalities in my opinion. (I have many good discussions with women about 'feminism' and they tell me about the 'feminists' who tell them that they are not 'feminists' because they hold the wrong views.)

It's like believing that Teresa May would be treated the same way when presenting with the same symptoms as a female member of this forum.

Not all people in any large group have the same access to healthcare, or life opportunities, or are seen as valuable. There are big splits between groups of the same gender as well as across genders.

 

I'm replying to myself - I posted my quote in December.

I just had the bill for this come through on email last night. I had completely forgotten I had bought it so long ago and decided it was an accidental purchase. But I was baffled at how I'd managed to do that. So I cancelled it. I'm not sure whether I'm pleased to have discovered how I came to buy it, or annoyed that I cancelled it, having forgotten all about it. I think I might be regretting cancelling it. *Sigh*