How "Bad Medicine" Dismisses and Misdiagnoses Women's Health Symptoms

[Ohiogal]

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."

"I definitely believe that the fact that medicine has been historically and continues to be mainly run by men has been a source of these problems," she says. "The medical knowledge that we have is just skewed towards knowing more about men's bodies and the conditions that disproportionately affect them."

"I found this to be one of the most disturbing things that I found in my research: how many women reported that as they were fighting to get their symptoms taken seriously, [they] just sort of sensed that what they really needed was somebody to testify to their symptoms, to testify to their sanity, and felt that bringing a partner or a father or even a son would be helpful. And then [they] found that it was [helpful], that they were treated differently when there was that man in the room who was corroborating their reports."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/27/597159133/how-bad-medicine-dismisses-and-misdiagnoses-womens-symptoms?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20180401&utm_campaign=&utm_term=

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I remember my mother being totally frustrated by male doctors in her generation. Most of them dismissed women's symptoms as "depression," ""over emotional," "hysterical," "hormones."