New report out:
Medical misogyny leaves women in pain for years, say MPs
What I find interesting is that 70% of OBGYN roles in the NHS are filled by women (
source) so why is there is such an issue?
A combination of training, text books and not everyone experiences everything.
From what I understand.
A lot of "female" conditions are not very well researched/understood because, well they're "female" so were often written off by the (mainly) male doctors who dominated research and text book writing, which means that a lot of doctors had their training based on books that might discredit or downplay some conditions, and a female doctor who hasn't experienced it themselves* (or not had it badly) might write off how bad some things can be because the text book and training says it isn't.
Add in things like an expectation that a lot of conditions will affect women the same as men (and medication will work the same way), when they don't always.
IIRC in America there are still large number of OBGYN's and nurses who are/were trained based on texts based on "knowledge" that is entrenched from 100+ years ago (or were trained by people who held those beliefs and they now carried it on), and for example state that non white women have a much higher pain tolerance (so for a common example, they may not offer the same pain relief when they are giving birth), which can be traced pretty much directly back to slavery and the idea that the slaves were either not quite human in the same way as the nice white people, or were less affected by the pain the slave owners and their overseers inflicted (so it was ok to treat them very poorly).
Meanwhile there are a whole host of conditions that were just written off as "hysteria" or women attention seeking etc until relatively recently, and they are only just being recognised and really looked at now as some of them are exclusive to women, and others are very hard to diagnose so they have had a tendency to be written off as people wanting painkillers etc as there was a lot more training in regards to things like addicts pretending to be in pain to score.
I think it's endrometriatis (sp?) where a woman can have tissue from the womb or something similar growing in the wrong places and it causes massive amounts of pain, and can result in the need to have organs removed due to the damage (I saw something the other day about a woman who'd had to have part of their intestine removed and a kidney or something) but it doesn't show up in most tests and none of the easy ones, meanwhile things like ovarian cysts and some other conditions can be as painful and dangerous to their reproductive health as a testicular torsion is to men but because you can't see it from the outside it's easy for it to be ignored (IIRC you need to do an ultrasound or similar to see it).
I've seen women commenting on how certain routine things can be exceptionally painful, but they're not even offered a local anaesthetic as standard (IIRC some of the gyno tests, getting UID's etc) in most cases and how finally finding an obgyn (often a woman) who understood and used preventative pain relief, made what was something they dreaded due to the pain into something that was merely very unpleasant.
I saw one woman describe the pain of a cervical scrape (I think it was) as being like having a tooth done without proper anaesthetic for her, and how it took her ages to find on obgyn who would apply a local to the area first.
On a personal note, my mum experienced something similar in terms of medics completely disregarding her condition in another field, she'd had multiple hip operations and because of them, and the the type/time they were done she was very much an outlying case in terms of how it affected her, she came out of a physio session after one of her last ops basically crying and was bedbound from the pain for days having had a physio utterly ignore her complaints of how painful what she was being told to do was, and how much the physio was hurting her when the physio started pulling the leg. In that case I think the consultant sent a complaint to the physio because it turns out the physio had ignored the instructions and warnings that had been included with the referral in terms of how fragile/weak the hip was and it's very limited range of "safe" movement (a lot of muscle damage).
If a trained medical professional who was clearly warned by another even more highly trained specialist who had literally seen the internal damage could ignore someone's very clear pain, I can see exactly how other medics might write off pain from an unknown/undiagnosed source.
On another personal note, my nephew's partner has some medical issues, it took her about 4 years to get an actual diagnosis, despite the fact she kept (for example) having a cracked/dislocated rib, it turned out she'd got a neurological condition causing some sort of very severe localised muscle spasms amongst other things, apparently one of the muscles involved was effectively causing a repeated problem for one or two of her ribs (I think she's now on something that basically damps down the muscle twitches and hasn't had it happen since).
*Think of how many people write off "The Flu" as not being bad because they've never had it badly themselves and had it knock them out completely for weeks/put them in hospital, or who don't understand how difficult it is to do normal things for someone who might just have a bad leg and need a stick/crutch - one of my mother's oldest friends went out with her on average about once a month for decades (and saw her almost daily for a decade at least) with my mother on crutches and in a wheelchair, my mum's friend broke her ankle after about 30 years of this and goes to us one day "I never realised how had it was to carry a cup of tea on crutches", I still think of that at times, how someone who had spent literally thousands of hours with someone who was always on critches/sticks didn't grasp how that could make it hard to do simple tasks (the my mum's friend wasn't stupid, she'd just never experienced it and given it much thought).