A New Kind of Hysteria
In this article “Endometriosis, or Modern Hysteria?”, the author draws from her personal experience with endometrial symptoms and attempts at diagnosing and controlling her disease to show how healthcare providers misdiagnosed, mistreated, and simply victimized her.
Endometriosis is a medical condition wherein the endometrial tissue that typically grows inside the uterus instead grows in other locations, such as the fallopian tubes and ovaries; these disparate areas of endometrial tissue then bleed during the menstrual cycle, resulting in chronic pelvic pain. Because endometriosis is idiopathic — without a clear cause — it can be challenging for medical professionals to correctly identity, diagnose, and treat, just as hysteria was for doctors through history.
This challenge of diagnosis was noted by the author, who still had not been formally diagnosed or treated for endometriosis at the time of publication. Her main concerns were how doctors ignored her past history of diagnosis and treatment, as well as dismissed her pain. Women’s pain is often written off, in spite of women typically having higher pain tolerance; the author stated that this dismissal shows that women’s health and health problems are still inextricably linked with emotions, just as they were in ancient times and through modern history.
He attributed my health issues to “women’s problems” and therefore to “emotional problems,” effectively diagnosing me with hysteria.
The colloquial definition of hysteria usually revolves around women being too emotional about something; this assumption can be a dangerous dismissal of symptoms, diseases, and the patient. The uncertainty of her diagnosis and treatment resulted in the author’s concern for others suffering from the same problems.
My main concern is that the diagnosis of “endometriosis” for many simply means more uncertainty: the name of a disease, but no clear treatment options.
The poor treatment options recommended by the doctors ranged from useless to actively harmful. The doctor recommended that the author have her IUD reinserted, despite the difficulties she had experienced with it before. Also suggested was the drug Lupron, which was originally used to treat prostate cancer and has a history of causing health issues and even death to women prescribed it for endometriosis. A final indignity was the doctor’s recommendation for psychiatric care.
He insisted that anxiety was causing my pain receptors to be out of whack, arguing that my first priority was to treat my actual “disease” — what he described as my anxiety — through his referral to a psychiatrist.
The author’s concern for others going through the same litany of doctor visits, diagnostic tests, and unrelenting pain showed that her writing was coming from a place of personal experience. Her individual connection to endometrial pain and medical mistreatment resulted in her caring more about how others went through these same experiences.
As this article was published on a self-proclaimed “Canadian Feminist Magazine” and the author is a PhD candidate in Feminist Studies, the author’s intended audience already has a basic understanding of the issues surrounding reproductive healthcare. While the author specifically referenced her healthcare experiences in Canada, the same (or worse) treatment could be expected in America, especially as reproductive healthcare continues to be a fraught issue.
