Healthcare Hysteria

Healthcare Hysteria

Why healthcare providers give women headaches rather than treat them

Going to the doctor is supposed to ensure that we are being cared for medically, right?

Not exactly. 

Rachel, a seemingly healthy adult woman, had collapsed one morning in her bathroom from unspeakable pain. Described by her husband as "not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge," he knew that his wife's pain in that moment was something to take very seriously. After calling the ambulance, Rachel was rushed to the ER.

As it turned out, Rachel had an ovarian cyst that had gone undetected for so long it had turned into an ovarian torsion, which is a cyst that is so heavy it weighs the ovary down so much that it twists the fallopian tubes. This medical emergency leads to organ failure if not intervened with surgically.

Sounds serious, right?

As you may guess, Rachel's experience in the emergency room was less than pleasurable and downright problematic. As for many citizens, women especially understand that the American healthcare system was not designed for them and will -more often than we like to admit- fail them. Rachel's pain will showcase the fact that women are not taken seriously enough when it comes to healthcare, which exacerbates their medical issues and the subsequent pains that come along with them. 

The mistreatment of women in the healthcare system comes in many forms and dates back centuries. From the misconception that women were "unbalanced" because of our wombs to the over diagnosis of hysteria. Marriage was even suggested as a cure for women with mental illnesses at one point. And let's not even get started on "frigidness".  

The current mistreatment of women in healthcare, however, seems to be the dismissal of painful symptoms. As soon as Rachel got to the ER, she was stuck in the overcrowded waiting room filled with people, who unless they were explicitly dying, were waiting their turn to be seen by the doctor. In writhing pain, Rachel could barely speak. 

"You're just feeling a little pain, honey." That's all that was said from the nurse that Rachel's husband flagged down to try and inform them of his wife's condition.

And her experience would only get worse.

The majority of doctors in America are men. So when female patients over the years presented with "atypical" symptoms of heart attacks, they were often overlooked and even sent home. Why is it that so many doctors did not recognize the symptoms of a heart attack in this particular population of people? This phenomenon furthers the patriarchal ideal that men are considered the norm, so much so that most studies related to coronary heart disease have only included male participants. Overlooking women in medical literature may provide some explanation as to why doctors are only on the lookout for symptoms typical in men. As described in Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks if Treated by Female Doctors by Ed Yong, there is a severe gap in results between male and female doctors when it comes to treating women and there is no gap in survival rates when the attending doctor is female. A long-term study of Florida emergency rooms found that when treated by male doctors, women are more likely to die. The researchers of the study stated that "most physicians are male, and male physicians appear to have trouble treating female patients."

This being said, it should come to no surprise that women who experience heart attacks are less likely to survive than men.

According to a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, female patients were also found less likely to be offered diagnostic tests by their doctors. They are often not offered an EEG or angiogram that would be given to any man experiencing chest pain. This fact especially rung true for Rachel's medical ordeal. After waiting hours in agony, a physician finally came to see her. However, he never performed an exam and no tests were ordered. Rachel was asked a few short questions and simply written off as having kidney stones. It was only when a female doctor came to see Rachel that she discovered this miscarriage of medical justice.

Now obviously not every doctor is intentionally harming their female patients. There is no malicious organization amongst doctors promoting the dismissal of women or their symptoms. But in places such as urban trauma centers, there is an atmosphere that does not exactly allow for doctors to hold hands with their patients. However, this fast-paced sentiment is taken too far when female patients are not receiving the adequate treatment they need and experience short or long-term suffering and even death. Moreover, in a study conducted at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, male doctors were found to have a higher success rate in treating heart attacks in women when they themselves worked with more female doctors. Women cannot come secondary to men -as we have for so long- especially in an area where our lives are on the line. We must be included in the conversation and work together with our male counterparts to improve this situation.

Dismissing pain as a symptom often leads to complications of patient's problems, as it did for  Rachel's. But more than that, to dismiss a woman's pain is to dismiss her entirely. How many more women will continue to suffer unnecessarily while being brushed off as "dramatic" and "too emotional"? Women know their bodies and we are more than capable of knowing when something is wrong with them. 

The pain that Rachel experienced was real and happens to so many other women whose stories we will never know. As a woman, it is hard enough to have your feelings and experiences validated by others. We get silenced, gaslighted, and some will just plain out not believe us. This is why more and more women must speak out about the injustices they face in the healthcare system. This will never completely fix the problem, but it is the first step in making it known that the way we are treated, dismissed, and overlooked is not acceptable anymore.

It is time to start taking women -and their bodies- seriously. The mistreatment of and bias towards women in the American healthcare system must come to a stop.