The medical system is failing women.
The stories are everywhere, and they’re deeply troubling. With staggering frequency, female ER patients who report pain are sent home, misdiagnosed, or referred for psychiatric evaluation. They may sit in the waiting room for longer than their male counterparts, only to be told when they’re finally seen, that their symptoms are all in their heads.
We learn to know our bodies and to trust our guts, so why are women being consistently silenced and ignored?
Women are more likely than men to suffer from pain associated with their reproductive systems, especially since menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth can all be accompanied by painful symptoms. Reproductive health concerns are often treated with a “grin and bear it” attitude—as if just because we all have periods, pain is something we’re supposed to smile through and endure. When we choose to call pain a right-of-passage, we’re also telling growing girls not to ask for help when they are hurting. Whether we mean to or not, we send the message that pain is inherently part of being a woman.
In their well-known study ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain”, Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian reported that women are frequently “inadequately treated by health-care providers” who dismiss their symptoms as psychosomatic or less severe than they report them to be. Women, Hoffmann & Tarzian wrote, are more often sedated than male pain patients, who are given treatment or medications for their conditions because their symptoms are often (most often incorrectly) believed to be emotional rather than medical.
Pain is, of course, subjective, so doctors have to rely on patient’s reports in order to diagnose them. The trouble is, they don’t seem to trust women very much at all. We may no longer use “hysteria” as an official diagnosis, but gender biases still shape the way female patients and their reported symptoms are perceived.
According to the US Department of Health’s Office on Women’s Health, women are believed to “overstate” the amount of pain they feel. A woman who reports that she’s experiencing a pain level of nine on a one-to-10 scale should be, of course, believed and treated urgently, adequately, and aggressively. Instead, she’s probably asked if she’s depressed or suffers from anxiety and certainly questioned about her hormonal cycle. Since she’s not necessarily really listened to, she may undergo a cursory exam that doesn’t fully match up with the symptoms she’s reporting, and may even receive a quick but incorrect (or incomplete) diagnosis. She might be sent home, told to wait it out or come back in if symptoms persist, or referred to another doctor and then referred again, and again, and again.
Some of this can be blamed on the nature of emergency rooms, which are inherently chaotic environments in which professionals are trying to see, diagnose, and treat as many patients as quickly as possible. They have to triage, but they also have a responsibility to treat patients and to appropriately assess and evaluate their health—but something must change so they can do better by women, who are suffering because somehow, gender bias has been allowed to dictate medical care. The way our society paints women—as complainers, as weaker than men, as sensitive and emotional beyond reason—is compromising our access to the health care we need and deserve.
The skepticism with which women are treated is an epidemic, but it shouldn’t be surprising. As a society, we’re extremely distrustful of women. We strip them of agency over their bodies. We don’t allow women to make decisions about their own wombs, we regulate their access to birth control, and we defund the very agencies that fight to make women’s healthcare a priority. We are a culture that tells women they were asking for it and we are a culture that, over and over again, tells women we don’t believe them.
We have to crack away at this distrust; when it comes to medical care, our lives literally depend on it. Until we dismantle the framework that says women are crazy, irrational liars, until we believe a woman can be the authority over her body and the most accurate reporter of her own experiences, we’re stuck. We can’t give women the care they need and deserve until we decide they’re worth believing.
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