The hidden ways your gender affects your healthcare

[SunSeeker]

Last edited Wed May 30, 2018, 02:46 AM - Edit history (1)

Women are more likely to wait longer for a health diagnosis and to be told it’s ‘all in their heads’. That can be lethal: diagnostic errors cause 40,000-80,000 deaths in the US alone.

Brain tumours are only one example. A 2015 study revealed a longer lag time from the onset of symptoms to diagnosis in female patients in six out of 11 types of cancer. It isn’t that women wait longer to seek medical attention – the delay occurs after they’ve first visited their GP. A 2013 study concluded that more than twice as many women as men had to make more than three visits to a primary care doctor in the UK before getting referred to a specialist for suspected bladder cancer. So did nearly twice as many with renal cancer.  

Women have long been considered the typical patients with psychogenic symptoms, so it’s no wonder that they are especially likely to find their symptoms dismissed as “all in their heads”. In a 1986 study, for example, researchers looked at a group of patients with serious organic neurological disorders who’d initially been diagnosed with hysteria. They identified the characteristics that made a patient vulnerable to such a misdiagnosis. One was having a prior diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder. Another was being a woman.

But while women may truly have a higher risk, the difference in prevalence rates may be at least partly a consequence of overdiagnosis in women and underdiagnosis in men. Studies in the 1990s suggested that as many as 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression were misdiagnosed. Furthermore, depression and anxiety are themselves symptoms of other diseases, which often go unrecognised in women. And, of course, the stress of suffering from an undiagnosed – and therefore untreated – disease often takes its mental toll. As one article points out, “Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180523-how-gender-bias-affects-your-healthcare

[momto3]

1. Interesting article.

It took me over 4 years to get my diagnosis of SLE. My first rheumatologist told me to see a psychiatrist. Fortunately, after I fired him, my second rheumatologist listened to me.

[Honeycombe8]

2. It's true, I think, that people in general attribute mental issues to problems....

I told some people in another forum that I am so unhappy in my new location & house that I'm depressed. People said I need to seek therapy for my depression, so that will help me be content where I am. ???? I pointed out...NO...I'm not unhappy in my new location because I'm depressed. I'm depressed because of my situation...so I need to MOVE. Depression is only an issue mentally if there's no good reason for it! (I'm depressed, because the logical answer, which is moving, will cost me a LOT of money lost, since I just moved here, and I don't know if I can afford that. Hence, my depression, as I realize I may be stuck in a place I hate, when I'm retired and have no years to waste.) If I were male, I probably wouldn't have fessed up to being depressed at the situation I find myself in. But if I had, I doubt so many would have disregarded the situation and just zeroed in on some mental issue needing therapy.

[Merlot]

5. It's called situational depression.

Took me a long time to understand that my "depression" was due to very real situations in my life. WHen I was younger I thought depression was like a cold - I caught one, who knows why, it runs it's course.

Knowing you're in a situation you can't change (espically those due to finances), seeing no realistic way out, is depressing.

Sorry to hear about your bad house move.

[Honeycombe8]

9. Thanks. I'm working on it, as they say. nt

[mopinko]

3. boy howdy. between my daughter and i we could write the book.

try being a young woman, w tats, piercings and blue hair.
took her to mayo, and nearly ended up punching someone.

took till she was 21 to dx epilepsy that she had had since she was 6. got treated for headaches by a pediatric neurologist. got a dx of ptsd, because she was seeing people following her. these "people" were seizures.
wasnt till she started having grand mal seizures till someone figured it out.

also took me 4 rheumies to catch that i had fibro, and only then because warpy told me what i had.
(anybody know where warpy disappeared to?)

[mercuryblues]

4. I have noticed

that even if you have been diagnosed a woman is still told or made to feel it is all in her head. My Mom had had an angioplasty done. A few months later she was complaining of the same symptoms. The Dr. told her he fixed her problem and gave her Prozac. 2 weeks later she had another heart attack. She got a new Dr. after that.

I had a heart attack and went to the ER. I was taken right in and treated ASAP. About 6 months later I had the exact same symptoms. The DR. on duty didn't believe me. Despite my history. Despite having my chart.

After about an hour of trying to convince him, where I resorted making up typical male symptoms. I finally told him to give me a fucking nitro pill. If I wasn't having a heart attack it wouldn't fucking hurt me. ( I thought my brother was going to fall out of his chair) But at least he gave me the pill.

About 20 minutes later he came in with my lab results and I was indeed having a heart attack. I was going to be admitted to get another stent. Duh. Went my cardiologist came in, I told him what happened and he said, I will talk to him.

[SunSeeker]

6. Wow. So glad you insisted on that nitro pill.

Horrible what you and others in this thread go through just trying to get treatment.

[mercuryblues]

7. the asshole

was standing there with my chart in his hand questioning me about indigestion. According to him, I didn't "present as panicked enough"

Women are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

[SunSeeker]

8. Unfuckingbelievable.

[Ms. Toad]

10. Duh. I could have told them that without a study.

My daughter had classic symptoms of UC, for a year. I repeatedly pointed them out to her GP - and was told I was just an overprotective mom. When I finally insisted on a referral to a GI doc, he handed me a phone book and said, "good luck!" (She was diagnosed within 2 weeks - and it only took that long because of the colonoscopy prep).

I was losing a quart of blood a month - and was told I was exaggerating, until I figured out a way to measure it. Despite having anemia so severe that I was sent for evaluation for bone marrow cancer (or a similar disease that prevented the formation of new red blood cells). My uterus was only very slightly enlarged - classic for the kind of uterine fibroid that causes overwhelming blood loss. That took a large part of a year, and three (male) specialists before diagnosis.

After those two I stopped waiting for a diagnosis. So I diagnosed myself with breast cancer, and my daughter with a rare liver condition. (Both confirmed by our physicians - the latter after I told the GI doc which test to run.)

So, yeah. Doctors don't look to women. Even when it is pretty darn clear we know what we're talking about.

[SunSeeker]

11. Your daughter is lucky to have you.

I diagnosed my own breast cancer as well, after my doctor told me the hard lump I was feeling was a milk duct because I was breast feeding. Told me a mammogram would be useless because of the presence of milk. Well, when I then months later I found lumps in my armpit, I knew it was in fact breast cancer, and now it was stage III. This time the doc sent me to get an ultrasound and the tumors lit up the screen like a Christmas tree. The doc, and it was a WOMAN, really fucked up. She could have sent me for that ultrasound right away. It was obviously not obscured by the presence of milk. Point is, doctors (mail and female) are trained in the same sexist system and imbued with the same anti-woman biases.

[Ms. Toad]

12. I fired my first breast cancer doctor - in large part for that reason.

Not only was she a woman, she was a breast cancer survivor. But she definitely fit the male model. When I asked her following the biopsy (before the results were back) what her experience told her about the tumor, she point blank refused to state what I could see in all of their faces. That's the paternalistic, I know better than you - don't worry your pretty little head off - nonsense I hate. (She also had no control over her own staff - the hospital system's fault - but I would expect someone who had just been through breast cancer would at least try/empathize. Her response was to tell me how much worse it would be elsewhere. Never tell a patient you know has significant personal experience with major illnesses how much worse someplace else will be - when she is telling you that your system falls below the acceptable level. She probably knows better than you about patient care im the area. (I have experience with 5 major health care systems in the immediate area, and with more than a half dozen of the top systems in the country outside of our immediate area)

I'm the 5th breast cancer in 4 generations - so it was expected, and I had been watching for it. I had hoped to have a few more years before it it, but the lump was unmistakable - even though I had to convince a half dozen specialists at breast examination that it actually was palpable.

How are you doing?

[SunSeeker]

13. Still kicking 13 years later.

[Ms. Toad]

14. Yay!

My mom's still kicking more than 2 decades after her first (more than 5 from her 2nd - distinct BC). Grandmother lived 25+ years, and died with BC, rather than from it.

[Cha]

15. Mahalo for this valuable

information, SunSeeker.

I had no idea..

The tendency to attribute women’s physical complaints to mental illness has its roots in the history of ‘hysteria’ – that mythical female disorder that, over the centuries, was blamed on a ‘wandering womb’ or sensitive nerves and eventually, post-Freud, came to be seen as a psychological problem. The terms have changed over the last century, but the concept – that the unconscious mind can ‘produce’ physical symptoms – has remained alive and well in medicine.

Your link didn't work for me for some reason.. but this one did..

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180523-how-gender-bias-affects-your-healthcare

[SunSeeker]

16. Thanks for letting me know! I fixed the link.

[Cha]

17. You're

It was so weird because the two links looked exactly the same.