NPR story (3/27/2018): How Bad Medicine Dismisses and Misdiagnoses Womens Symptoms?

[TrixieStix]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health...hare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

As she began to research her own condition, Dusenbery realized how lucky she was to have been diagnosed relatively easily. Other women with similar symptoms, she says, "experienced very long diagnostic delays and felt ... that their symptoms were not taken seriously."

Dusenbery says these experiences fit into a larger pattern of gender bias in medicine. Her new book, Doing Harm, makes the case that women's symptoms are often dismissed and misdiagnosed — in part because of what she calls the "systemic and unconscious bias that's rooted ... in what doctors, regardless of their own gender, are learning in medical schools."

 

[Lidia]

Yes, we know now that my husband must come to all doctor’s appointments for my daughter. I only wish someone had told
me that sooner.

 

[Frogger]

An excerpt from Maya Dusenbery's book, Doing Harm.
Chapter 7 Contested Illnesses: When Diseases Are “Fashionable”

"I can’t tell you how many times I went into the clinic and was told I had either an inner ear infection or dehydration because I was dizzy.” She took to drinking a liter of water before appointments just to preempt the suggestion. “I’m like, ‘I’ve been alive for twenty-eight years—I’m telling you that something is wrong that I’ve never experienced before; I didn’t just forget to drink water.’” Another trick she started doing pretty early on, as she began to get the sense that doctors thought she was exaggerating her symptoms, was to bring her fiancé with her. “I felt like if I had a man in the room with me—and a man who vouched for me to the extent that he was planning to marry me—that somehow I would be treated better. And I was.”
A biracial young woman in a Ph.D. program at Harvard, Brea found it jarring to find herself in such a position. “This was the first time in my life that I had ever been like, ‘What I really need in this situation is a chaperone.’ It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever doubted my account of the world. I felt suddenly like I had gone from being an expert and authority on myself to being in this really helpless position, where I felt like I couldn’t be too challenging, because I was afraid people wouldn’t help me.

I always like to bring someone along myself.