“Is Medicine’s Gender Bias Killing Young Women?”
“For decades, studies have attempted to tease out the various factors that may contribute to that significant gender gap. Recently, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health published a qualitative study exploring the experiences of women under the age of 55 who had been hospitalized for a heart attack. The main take-away — according to most headlines summing up the results — seems to be that younger women may “ignore” or “dismiss” their symptoms and “hesitate” or “delay” in seeking care, in part out of anxiety about raising a false alarm.
But focusing on what individual women do — or don’t do — when they’re having a heart attack is a way of subtly shifting the blame for the deep and systemic failures of our health care system onto its victims. In reality, the themes that emerged from the interviews with 30 women in the Yale study, as well as previous research on women and heart attacks, paint a more complicated — and even more disturbing — picture of how gender bias plays out on multiple levels, both within and outside the medical system, to affect women’s ability to get life-saving care in a crisis…
Last year, the American Heart Association credited recent gender-specific research with improving the diagnostic processes for non-obstructive coronary heart disease in women. “For decades, doctors used the male model of coronary heart disease testing to identify the disease in women, automatically focusing on the detection of obstructive coronary artery disease,” AHA cardiologist Jennifer H. Mieres explained at the time. “As a result, symptomatic women who did not have classic obstructive coronary disease were not diagnosed with ischemic heart disease, and did not receive appropriate treatment, thereby increasing their risk for heart attack…
it can be seen, too, in the women who simply disengage from the system altogether.”
I was thinking about this the other day, when I was feeling off but I couldn’t develop a solid and clear description of what I was feeling so I didn’t even really mention it to other people. And I realize that it’s because I didn’t really trust anyone to take it seriously; what was the point in mentioning it if people probably wouldn’t care that much?
I mean, recently a friend of mine felt terrible all day long and mentioned it to other people and they all said she looked fine, so she didn’t go home early and when she finally did get home she found out she had a 104-degree fever.
My thing went away after a few days, hopefully it doesn’t happen again, but what if it hadn’t gone away and had turned out to be a real health problem? I don’t know at what point I would have had the confidence to make a doctor’s appointment and I don’t know if I would have had the luck to find someone with the listening skills to help me communicate what was happening.
I think part of the problem here is that, generally, women have learned not to mention pain until it becomes evident to other people. And so I’m thinking about how I can make sure to validate my friends’ pain and make sure that they know it shouldn’t just be another thing to carry silently. Maybe that won’t mean going to a doctor, but it should at least mean letting yourself go home early and asking a friend to bring you some soup.
Related: “What Should We Call Girl Pain?”; “Younger Women Hesitate To Say They’re Having A Heart Attack”; “ADHD Is Different for Women”; “How many girls mask autism spectrum disorder, like me?”; *new* this excellent comic
