“Being a woman should have no influence on a physician’s clinical ability to diagnose a disease,” the authors of the report wrote. “It is, therefore, difficult to accept that overall women experience much greater delays in diagnosis than men. The more rapid diagnosis of men illustrates that the capacity to do so exists.”
I agree with this 10o%! Doctors job is to help people, why can't they simply do that!?
Not being taken seriously enough to be treated is frustrating enough. But the biggest danger of having your symptoms dismissed is that once doctors have settled on the conclusion that they are ‘all in your head’ – or made up in order to get painkillers – they stop searching for another explanation.Consider the experience of patients with rare diseases, who go more than seven years, on average, before being correctly diagnosed. Along the way, they visit four primary care doctors and four specialists and receive two to three misdiagnoses.
Many times people are not wanting to be given opioids, at least I never ever wanted that, but the doctors think that most people are wanting to be given prescription pain killers. We just want answers, long term solutions to our issues, not an addiction to pain killers.
As a woman of colour, Jackie was facing more than gender bias. Implicit biases on the basis of race, class, weight, sexual orientation, and trans status all affect clinical care as well.
Not only is there a gender bias, but there is racial, class and orientation biases that all go hand-in-hand.
As one article points out, “Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients.”
From my own personal experience this is very true. Having so much pain all the time can cause you to become more and more depressed because there isn't anything you can do. With doctors failing to identify the source of the issue it continues to grow into something that it is not. Having pain can be debilitating which really can cause depression because you are left feeling hopeless, like you have to live the rest of your life not being understood or taken seriously on top of all the pain.
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.The fact that women have higher rates of mood disorders is, itself, likely one reason that it’s so common for women to get a psychogenic label. In the US, women are about twice as likely to have a diagnosis of depression or an anxiety disorder as men.Studies suggested that as many as 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression were misdiagnosed
30-50% of women diagnosed with depression being misdiagnosed is such a large margin of error that it can't possibly be true. Unfortunately it is true, and that just goes to show how women continue to be misdiagnosed. You would think that in todays day-in-age, and modern medicine, that there wouldn't be any medical misdiagnoses, but the continual medical biases failing women prove that to be false.
With tests revealing nothing amiss, Jackie’s primary care doctor decided that she must be depressed and prescribed antidepressants. They didn’t help at all, but Jackie was “accepting whatever the doctors said”.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.
After seeing so many doctors and being told "nothing is wrong with you" it can be a sort of relief when you get some kind of diagnosis. Stress, depression and anxiety seem to be one of the first things doctors jump to when they either can't figure out what is wrong (aka not doing their jobs), or when they just want to make a diagnosis and get the patient out, especially when it comes to women.
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. More than just a frustration for patients, these delays cause unnecessary deaths. Each year, an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 people die due to diagnostic errors in the US alone.
I believe that women do wait longer to seek medical attention because they are not taken seriously so often. We would rather not waste our time and save ourselves from more embarrassment being told that we are overreacting and that nothing is wrong. Waiting can cause serious damage that can lead to death. Also being misdiagnosed is just as dangerous, the doctors need to be more proactive, take their job seriously and drop their biases.
One 39-year-old woman quoted in the report recalled: “One of the GPs I saw actually made fun of me, saying ‘what did I think my headaches were, a brain tumour?’ I had to request a referral to neurology. I went back repeated times to be given antidepressants, sleep charts, analgesia, etc. No one took me seriously.”
Not being taken seriously when it comes to health, as a women, is very common. Many women go without diagnosis for long periods of time, sometimes even years. Being given multiple medications that aren't what we asked for and having to go back to the doctor time and time again, only to continue being dismissed.