Aston sought medical help after her symptoms—which included severe migraines, abdominal pain, joint dislocations, easy bruising, iron deficiency, fainting, tachycardia, and multiple injuries—began in 2015, per the New Zealand Herald. She was referred to Auckland Hospital, where a doctor accused her of causing her own illness. Because of his accusations, Aston was placed on psychiatric watch.
Research suggests women are often much more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. A 2009 study of patients with heart disease symptoms found 31.3 per cent of middle-aged women “received a mental health condition as the most certain diagnosis”, compared to just 15.6 per cent of their male counterparts. Additionally, a 2020 study found that as many as 75.2 per cent of patients with endometriosis—a painful disorder that affects the tissue of the uterus—had been misdiagnosed after they started experiencing endometriosis symptoms. Among those women, nearly 50 per cent were told they had a “mental health problem”.
Doctor-patient power dynamics deserve so much more scrutiny than they get.
It’s always heartbreaking to hear of somebody who died or continued to suffer because they couldn’t convince the gatekeeper of care to examine them properly.
The number of times a woman friend of mine has had ridiculous difficulties to get diagnosed with something they obviously had boggles my mind. I have a friend with EDS who spent two years getting tests and traveling all over the state to see different specialists before she got her diagnosis. It’s infuriating to see, I can only imagine what it’s like to live with.
It’s a result of decades, even centuries of systematic medical misogyny. Studies were done on male subjects, research done by male scientists, and standards used by male doctors. Females were (and evidently still are) thought of as the same as men, medically. Obviously, this is incorrect, but ongoing research involving more female subjects does make me hopeful that medicine is turning over a new leaf.
Unless you have a source for that second sentence I’m going to have to call bullshit on that, I’ve read probably 100s of articles on clinical trials and the spread of patients tested is usually close to even gender wise, if not with a very slight female bias, at least in the studies I’ve read. The problem isn’t from a lack of medical knowledge of how women work, it’s from misogynistic shit stain doctors that read these articles but still treat women in such a horrible manner systemically despite the literature being out there.
Its more of a societal problem than a lack of knowledge of how women’s bodies work, but in my opinion that makes these doctors even more horrible people than if it were just a basic lack of knowledge of women’s anatomy, they choose to he terrible people despite the knowledge being easily available to them.
The FDA effectively banned “people of childbearing potential” from participating in clinical trials in 1977.
https://www.womenshealth.gov/30-achievements/04
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800017/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0884217515335267
I mean I’m aware of the controversial past in regards to how women weren’t represented in trials but your own link says that they reversed that decision in the 90’s so there has been sufficient time for doctors to learn the differences in biology because the research has been built upon robustly during the last 30 years. So that makes them terrible people for not keeping up with the research was the point of my other comment.
Oh, my friend, you vastly underestimate how long it takes for, first, the clinical trials involving women to actually be conducted to a similar extent as those in men, then for medical regulators to actually make it a standard of practice, then for medical education to develop teaching methods for the standard, and for existing doctors to actually review and implement the new standards, which may not ever happen for some doctors, as you say.
Yes, they reversed the decision decades ago, but medicine moves incredibly slow when putting things into practice.
I had a very misogynistic allergist try to tell me my reaction to a skin prick test was all in my head. He berated me during a tolerance test telling me I was making it all up even though my back was one big welt and I was getting dizzy/confused. I had a previously documented anaphylaxis reaction of severe hypotension that almost killed me prior to seeing this asshole. If I had been in my right mind at the time I would have punched him in his smug face.
When my mother was getting chemo, she was going to miss an appointment so the nurse in charge decided to give her a double dose to make up for it.
The radiation burns my mother received were described as ‘4th degree burns’ they were so bad.
You simply cannot blindly trust medical professionals. They are just as stupid as the general public, just as ignorant, and desensitized to other people’s pain. You have to fight for yourself in their arena because they aren’t going to.
What the fuck. What happened? Did she make a recovery? Was there any compensation or consequences?
No consequences that I know of, but I was only 13 so maybe I just wasn’t told. The burns healed but the cancer got her the next year.
Damn, sorry to hear it man
I’ve been on that journey myself being a chronically ill (from a young age which doesn’t help with the patronising and assumptions made, and apparently autistic, which I only found out as an adult because “autism is a boy’s condition”) woman.
I still, decades in, get the doubt and the “it’s all in your head” and the “just emotional” and all that nonsense. I’ve stopped going to the doctor because it’s just too distressing to try and break through that judgment and get any actual care. I won’t even call an ambulance at this point (in the UK, so not to do with cost) because I’ve been treated so poorly on several past occasions I’ve had to.
And yet I’m one of the lucky ones because eventually after years of fighting I was diagnosed with the illness I have and I’ve not been locked up on a psych ward for it (yet, though of course I was prescribed psych meds as first second and third resort to my pain complaint).
This is one in so so many ways that the patriarchy quietly keeps us down, and it’s so fucked up that when you try telling those who aren’t impacted by it about it, even if they don’t mean to, the easiest thing for them is to gaslight you because they’ve never experienced or witnessed this kind of treatment, and doctors are seen as infallible, so you must be imagining it, making it up, exaggerating - that’s all easier than accepting the reality of just how fucked up and oppressive such deeply respected institutions like that of medicine actually are (not just misogyny of course, but ableism, racism, queerphobias and so on). The people in these jobs are still just people, they are socialised in the same oppressive world the rest of us are, and carry the same biases as the rest of the population (if not often worse due to disproportionate privilege in the field).
I hate that this is just going to keep happening, and in many places get worse.
This is maddening, the thought that if that woman were a man, they could still be alive today. Crazy
I’m gonna cherish the day when all these doctors that suck at diagnosing are replaced with AI. It’s so stupid that you have to go to 100 doctors to find one that takes you seriously and actually gives you the right diagnosis.
Unfortunately, AI is only as good as it’s training data. If there are biases in the training data, those biases shine through later.
AI is interesting but not a silver bullet.
Hit the nail on the head. There’s a really good book ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ that goes into it.
We’ll need to ensure that this bias against female (and also male) patients isn’t adopted by the AI. We’re already not properly testing medicine on both sexes. Medical textbooks often list stuff as more or less common in one sexe. This is entirely possible but if the data isn’t properly screened we’re just moving the problem. Data can exist and be wrong for many reasons. We should address that urgently. It is bad for everyone. I think it is plausible an AI could have reached the same conclusion here because of all the mental health problems considered far more common in women. Did anyone ever even check where the source of that data is? Because some stuff really hasn’t been rechecked in the last 50 years I’m sure.
Endometriosis misdiagnosis is common because it requires surgery to even get the diagnosis, and if you don’t have insurance it’s $25 000
As a man, I personally don’t believe male doctors should be in charge of these types of medical conditions anyway, we lack the required organs to even begin to understand where the pain comes from, so we have no frame of reference when women talk about their internal issues. I told my girlfriend 5 years ago she had symptoms of endometriosis, and the male doctor at the woman’s pavilion dismissed it. The female doctor at the woman’s pavilion the town over that she switched to immediately, within minutes, on the first meeting said she was experiencing symptoms of endometriosis and that it’s something they will monitor and consider.
It also seems like the cysts caused by endometriosis can be treated the same as regular ovarian cysts, so they see the symptom of it dissappear and just assume they got the diagnosis right the first time.
It’s honestly kind of fucked up with just how common it is that it’s dismissed so easily.
As a man, I personally don’t believe male doctors should be in charge of these types of medical conditions anyway, we lack the required organs to even begin to understand where the pain comes from, so we have no frame of reference when women talk about their internal issues
I was thinking about this sentence for a while before commenting and I ended up deciding that I disagree.
For me, the issue isn’t that the doctor is male. Even women that have been through regular GYN visits and even births wouldn’t be able to describe their body parts and functions beyond just the outside parts - if they weren’t educated about this. And most doctors are probably healthy people that do not have those kinds of symptoms so they would be able to reference it.
So when we educate both male and female doctors about the human body of both genders, I tend to believe the knowledge is equal.
But if that’s the case, then it could mean a few things. First, it would mean that women are being misdiagnosed often by both genders. I’ve read many threads in TwoX in reddit before, and it seems to be the case - there are a lot of stories of female doctors who also dismiss women’s symptoms. There are also stories of male doctors who did not dismiss them as well, so it’s not really based on their gender.
And secondly, it means the problems comes from elsewhere. It could be lack of research on female patients, or generally a lack of full understanding of women’s bodies that contribute to it - I’m not educated enough to make a factually correct statement here. But this is my opinion: this happens because of our culture. Doctors are not immune to it, and in many cultures in the US and Europe, women are often viewed as dramatic, bitchy, vengeful, drama queens, exaggerating, and flat out attention seekers to the point of lying.
This view is ingrained into many people from childhood. It is very hard for a person to even notice that the culture is skewing their point fo view on women. You can see it everywhere in media.
Since that affects doctors (of both genders), I think they tend to use this skewed view of women when they diagnose them. I’m sure it happens subconsciously and they don’t mean it, but that’s what hapoens. And if you just assume the person complaining about stuff is lying or exaggerating and is just a drama queen, you tend to downplay their complaints, which usually ends up in a dismissal. Case in point - the girl in the article.
So how do we fix this? We need to make sure more doctors are aware of this. Increase awareness of women specific illnesses, even rare ones. Find more ways to test women for possible causes for the symptoms they complain about. Increase difficulty for doctors to dismiss a woman’s complaints (e.g. a doctor must refer to a second opinion first, for instance). Take women’s complaints to the board (like Aston did in the article) much, much more seriously and make sure the responsible doctor is discouraged from repeating this behavior, and so on.
