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doc_paradiseWomen are flocking to wellness because modern medicine still doesn’t take them seriously
"The medical system is even more terrible for women, whose experience of pain is routinely minimized by health practitioners. In the emergency room, women routinely wait longer than men to receive medication for acute pain. At the gynecologist’s office, severe period-related pain is often dismissed or underestimated. Ingrained sexism means that doctors may regard women as either earth mothers or hypochondriacs; that is, either women possess deep wellspring of internal pain control that they ought to be able to channel during childbirth, or their pain is psychological in nature—a symptom of hysteria.
Conditions that affect women at higher rates than men, including depression and autoimmune diseases like fibromyalgia, are much more likely to be dismissed as having a psychological rather than a physiological source. Chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers are still instructed to rely on exercise and positive thinking, despite research that indicates these measures do not cure the condition. Many women with autoimmune diseases, endometriosis, or even multiple sclerosis go undiagnosed for years, despite multiple trips to doctors and specialists—all the while being told that their symptoms could just be stress."
"The medical system is even more terrible for women, whose experience of pain is routinely minimized by health practitioners. In the emergency room, women routinely wait longer than men to receive medication for acute pain. At the gynecologist’s office, severe period-related pain is often dismissed or underestimated. Ingrained sexism means that doctors may regard women as either earth mothers or hypochondriacs; that is, either women possess deep wellspring of internal pain control that they ought to be able to channel during childbirth, or their pain is psychological in nature—a symptom of hysteria.
Conditions that affect women at higher rates than men, including depression and autoimmune diseases like fibromyalgia, are much more likely to be dismissed as having a psychological rather than a physiological source. Chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers are still instructed to rely on exercise and positive thinking, despite research that indicates these measures do not cure the condition. Many women with autoimmune diseases, endometriosis, or even multiple sclerosis go undiagnosed for years, despite multiple trips to doctors and specialists—all the while being told that their symptoms could just be stress."
no subject
Date: 2017-06-30 06:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-30 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-30 06:03 pm (UTC)ETA: I think that as right as it is about sexism, it undersells the underlying problems in medicine that are afflicting all patients, and which exacerbate the sexism. I think there's something going on that's analogous to how economic downturns and protracted unemployment predict rises in domestic violence. I think stressed systems take out their stress disproportionately along lines of oppression because of course they do. I think medicine is a massively stressed system.
I am suspicious that there's not enough clinical time and effort to go around, and when that is the case, who gets adequate care becomes, horribly, a matter of treater discretion. Once resource allocation becomes a matter of the discretion of individuals, it becomes massively unjust, utterly subject to those individuals' prejudices and unconcious biases.
My theory is that in a system with enough health care to go around – enough treater-hours, enough funding, enough access to the tools and materials of health care – then women (and other minorities) would only be subject to the discriminatory biases and prejudices that expressly indicate different treatment, such as doctors actually believing women just complain more therefore need less pain relief than men. But once you have health care scarcity, you also have treaters making snap decisions about who is most "in need" of their time and attention and resources, and automatically decrement the priority of treating women. So, say, a woman will sit longer in a ER before even getting to be seen by an MD who will decide she's complaining for no reason and doesn't need pain relief.