Maya Dusenbery Quotes

One 1993 study suggested that up to 40 percent of black women with endometriosis were misdiagnosed as having sexually transmitted PID. "It was so blatantly racist it just blows my mind," Ballweg says.

Indeed, the unjustifiable error was not in failing to more quickly determine
a very unlikely diagnosis but in not taking Maggie's report of extreme
pain seriously - and eventually deciding it must not be real at all - until
they did.

Chronic illness, with its invisible symptoms of fatigue and pain, is largely the burden of women. And it's worth considering to what extent its relative neglect by the medical system is because it mostly affects women, whose complaints are so often heard not as a roar but as a whine.

To be sure, depression, anxiety, and prolonged stress can cause specific physical symptoms, but these symptoms are not limitless, nor are they actually unexplained. When doctors invoke these labels for symptoms as diverse as vomiting, paralysis, and sever, unending pain, it is the concept of the somatoform disorders--hysteria dressed up in modern garb-- that allows them to do so.

But women bear the brunt of this bias. According to patient surveys,
women are more likely than men to have been advised to lose weight by a
health care provider.

research has pointed to women's tendency to delay going to the ER
when they're actually having a heart attack as one factor that may contribute
to their worse outcomes compared to men.

In fact, one wonders whether the disease would have been
recognized at all were it not for the minority of male sufferers.

And whenever you hear a condition described as a "contested disease,"
the odds are good that the "contest" is between, on the one hand, mostly
women patients who believe their condition to be an organic one and, on
the other hand, a medical establishment that assumes their "medically unexplained
symptoms" are all in their heads.

Interestingly, however, it seems that the long-standing assumption that
their hormonal cycle makes female animals inherently more variable than
males is just that: an assumption.

Nevertheless, a 2005 study found that
nearly 80 percent of animal pain studies published in recent years had used
only males.

Experts in diagnostic errors provided an answer to the puzzle that had been nagging me: How was it possible for missed diagnoses to be so common and yet not perceived by doctors as a major problem? The problem is that physicians, while generally aware that mistakes happen, greatly underestimate how often they make them. In his talks to doctors on the topic, Graber often asks how many have made a diagnostic error in the past year; typically, only about 1 percent of the hands go up. 'The concept that they, personally, could err at a significant rate is inconceivable to most physicians,' he writes. In short, they think it's the other guy. This overconfidence is not necessarily their fault: doctors simply do not get the feedback needed to gain an accurate sense of their batting average. They assume their diagnoses are correct until they hear otherwise. Since there are few, if any, health care organizations that systematically measure diagnostic error rates, they typically learn of their mistakes only from the patients themselves.

A commenter on one endometriosis
Facebook group reported, "My doctor told me having a baby would help
my pain. I'm only eleven.

The median time it took for men to get an EKG was 15 minutes, compared
to 21 minutes for women; the gender gap was 28 compared to 36 minutes
for fibrinolytic therapy to break up a clot and 93 compared to 106 minutes
to implant a coronary stent.

When they're pregnant, women may find their symptoms blamed on
pregnancy, and then, after giving birth, on the normal postpartum healing
process, and then simply on motherhood itself.

Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.

PinkNews coined the term "trans broken arm syndrome" to describe it: "Healthcare
providers assume that all medical issues are a result of a person being trans.
Everything - from mental health problems to, yes, broken arms.

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.'

In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease t

As one patient with chronic fatigue syndrome put it, 'The difference between a crazed neurotic and a seriously ill person is simply a test.