“Not In Her Head” (2nd Place Academic Essay)

Evelyn Lloyd

 

          A few months ago, my co-worker Cassidy was complaining to me about her period. Specifically, she was complaining about her cramps as a young teen. She recalled she often stayed home from school, bent double on her bed or couch, vomiting because of the unbearable pain. However, when she went to see the doctor, he listened as she outlined her complaints, declared she was fine, and sent her right back home without anything to show for it. For years after, Cassidy suffered through each menstrual cycle, coping with heat packs and pain killers which hardly seemed to help, all while her doctor could have prescribed something yet refused. The same week Cassidy told me of her experience, I was scrolling through the YouTube comments of a video on a similar topic: people describing experiences in which their doctors ignored and disregarded them, whose dismissal of symptoms led to months or years without diagnosis for harmful conditions. Countless women in the comment section expressed anger and frustration toward a medical system they felt had failed them. Although I vaguely knew of this phenomenon, for the first time, I wondered just how much had already been researched of the topic. When I started looking, I discovered this issue has much deeper roots than I anticipated, with a long way to go for improvement. However, not all hope is lost, even if we have quite a long way to go. Due to a history of sexist health notions, patriarchal attitudes, and research bias, women are frequently dismissed, misdiagnosed, and mistreated as patients, but through expanding study participant diversity and self-advocacy women can make strides in ensuring their health care improves.

            When women do not get the diagnosis and treatment they require, they go home, where they suffer the painful, and sometimes deadly, consequences. Journalist Maya Dusenbery, executive editor for the blog Feministing, details the experience of a teenage girl, “Maggie” whose name was changed for privacy. In her book, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, Maggie recalls waking one morning and, shortly after eating breakfast, “felt a horrible pain – ‘The worst I’d ever experienced in my entire life’” in her abdomen (61). The pain would return every time she ate, to such a brutal degree she could hardly walk or breathe (Dusenbery 62). However, she would arrive back at the hospital several times, visits during which blood tests and scans appeared normal, and she was repeatedly scolded for being dramatic (Dusenbery 80-81). Instead of asking Maggie about the pain, they dismissed and verbally berated her, until she felt she had no choice but to leave once again. At home, Maggie’s mother observed that the pain was so awful she did nothing besides “‘Silently rocking back and forth…as if in a trance’” and Maggie could “‘Only remember being certain I was going to die soon’” (Dusenbery 81). Forty-eight excruciating hours passed before the correct tests came out to support Maggie’s concerns: a rapidly growing ulcer, a hole in her stomach, fluid and air leaking into her diaphragm, and septic shock ensuing from the ruptured organ (Dusenbery 104). Had the doctors taken the time to inquire about Maggie’s pain and symptoms, rather than brush her off as acting melodramatic, they could have diagnosed her sooner and saved her hours of horrific physical agony.

            Maggie is only one example of a condition going untreated while the patient faced the consequences. An oncologist, physician, and author of 2024 book All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why it Matters Today, Dr Elizabeth Comen introduces us to several other patients. “Stella” was diagnosed and treated for anxiety, which she insisted she didn’t have, for months while she suffered exhaustion, light-headedness, and body numbness from mononucleosis (Comen 251). “Katie” was in college when she began “experiencing pain in her joints, her hair was falling out in clumps, and she had a rash,” signs that would eventually point to lupus, but was first diagnosed as depression despite such symptoms never existing in the criteria (Dusenbery 147). Journalist Emily Dwass, author of Diagnosis Female: How Medical Bias Endangers Women’s Health, references Sharon Anderson. Anderson, president of the Leiomyosarcoma Support & Direct Research Foundation, knew the tumors in her body would not abate even after multiple surgeries because they possessed estrogen receptors, much like breast cancer, yet “It took Sharon six months to convince her healthcare provider that she needed to have her ovaries removed” (Dwass 103-04). Anxiety, depression, and female anatomy; in all cases, these women knew something was very wrong in their bodies. They knew the first diagnosis they were given were incorrect and they demanded real consideration and treatment. They got it, but it took much longer than it reasonably should have, and even then, not every woman is so lucky.

           The cost of repeated dismissal is very real, effecting patient-physician trust to such a degree women may stop trying to seek help. Journalist Chloe Laws, in a 2024 Women’s Health article titled “The Rise in Women Giving Up on the Fight for a Diagnosis,” says she has “all but given up hope of a formal diagnosis” after years of nothing, and has “instead turned to self-diagnosis to validate my own reality.” Anna Prendergast states she “lost count of the times I’ve been dismissed, talked over, gaslit, undermined and flat-out told I’m wrong about my own body” and has abandoned hope of a proper diagnosis since she has “heard everything from chronic allergies and depression to endometriosis and an autoimmune disease” (Laws). Another 2021 study in which fourteen North Carolinian women were interviewed about health care barriers found every single interviewee expressed they “felt they were treated differently because of their gender” by their doctors, making them feel “patronized or unheard” (Cardoso). When women are repeatedly disregarded and diagnosed with conditions they know are wrong, they are less likely to return to the doctor for symptoms that will be written off as stress or depression. Or worse, they will be dubbed crazy, over-exaggerative, or attention seeking. Any person would feel less inclined to visit a place at which they would be berated or ignored.

            Going undiagnosed and untreated is frustrating, but being called hysterical is absolutely infuriating. Women of today suffer from a sexist perception of wellness that began practically at the dawn of time. “Hysteria” is derived from hystera, literally the Greek word for womb (Comen 229; Dusenbery 63). The term “hysterical neurosis” was only removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980 (Comen 225; Tasca et al.) and had historically been used as the de-facto diagnosis for unwell women regardless of the symptoms they showed. Doctors believed whatever troubles women faced the answer was simply inherent female insanity, since they believed the female mind was tied so closely to her female organs. Greek philosopher Plato believed the uterus moved around the body causing hysteria and other illness (Dusenbery 63; Schoch), and a fifth century Hippocratic text claimed “‘The womb is the origin of all diseases’ in women” (Dusenbery 64). Hippocrates’ medical texts continued to be referential for centuries to follow (Tasca et al.), pointing to how little progress was made in the field of women’s health. In 1883, physician Auguste Fabre claimed, “‘As a general rule, all women are hysterical and…every woman carries with her the seed of hysteria’” (Comen 223; Dusenbery 214). Every medical ailment and unexplained symptom under the sun was chalked up to hysteria if a woman experienced it. Women may as well have been born hysterical.

             Simply deleting a term from history books will not also remove it from the minds of those in which it has been ingrained, especially if “delete” is only a technical description. After the term hysteria was removed from the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980, it did not actually disappear in entirely from its pages; instead, it was replaced with a section called “the ‘somatoform disorders’” (Dusenbery 76). Essentially, the diverse range of symptoms for hysteria were divided up and given fancy new names. One was “‘Hypochondriasis’ … reserved for patients with ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ who also had an intense fear of having a serious illness” (76). MUS, medically unexplained symptoms, became a term applied to patients to “imply a psychogenic origin” (77). Meaning, any symptoms doctors had no clue how to explain, were decidedly fake on the patient’s part. Worse yet, instead of telling their patients they were unsure of the issue, they pretended like nothing was wrong at all. Dusenbery states, “In one 2009 study doctors reported that they most commonly reassured patients with ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ that ‘nothing’s wrong’ because diagnostic tests had come back negative” (78). Additionally, it was noted that nearly all the somatoform disorders, MUS included, were especially common in women (Dusenbery 77). The lack of research on women resulted in a bounty of symptoms not easily explained, leading right back to notions of “all in her head” and miscommunication between physician and patient. Decades after the term disappeared, women are still hysterical.

            Although hysteria is no longer a valid medical diagnosis, and centuries have passed since the notions put forth by Ancient Greek men, the idea of crazy women lingers in the form of other misdiagnosis to this day. Every time women are told they are simply stressed while they experience a heart-attack (Dusenbery 122; Dwass 131), when women are declared to be overexaggerating or attention seeking while in terrible pain (Dusenbery 68; Schoch), to being told, point blank, their conditions are “all in their head” (Dwass 100). Women are dismissed and accused of faking when they seek medical help, dubbed hypochondriacs and overly anxious. In an interview conducted as part of a 2014 study regarding gendered bias in heart attack diagnosis, a cardiologist stated, “‘In training, we were taught to be on the look-out for hysterical females who come to the emergency room’” (Dusenbery 124). Dusenbery also describes a study in which “44 percent of women with heart disease said they felt health care providers…attributed [their complaints] to psychological causes” and one woman said, “‘Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress’” (122). Hysteria may no longer be a real diagnosis according to guidelines, but its spirit remains constant in today’s medical atmosphere to an alarming degree.

            One key contribution to the perceived source of hysteria happened to be men’s views on women’s education and the patriarchal notions of the men who proposed those recommendations. One “Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke of Harvard Medical School issued a dire warning to educators and parents alike” in 1873, proclaiming a woman should not be educated as a man would if she wished to “‘retain uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system’” (Comen 236). Of course, most men of the time hated the idea of women being educated regardless of the effect it had on her health. Since at least the 1800s, women’s health advice came from male doctors, and the men of the time thought primarily of two crucial things: women should be nice to look at and women should have babies. For example, women are more likely to be advised to lose weight than men, even though slimness does not automatically equate to good health. Dusenbery claims, based on a study from 2014, “53 percent of women reported being shamed by a physician, compared to 38 percent of the men, and their weight and sexual activity were the top two reasons for such experiences” (244). Countless women face body image issues, exacerbated by the male physicians who deem them overweight when their BMI barely reaches above the range of “normal.” Earlier, between the 1840s to the 1870s, doctors began advising women against wearing corsets, not because they might sustain an injury or long-term health complications, but because the stooping posture it caused made them ugly. Comen explains, “They cursed women’s foolishness and lack of education in their own physiology, without which ‘it is of little use to protest against the cruel injury to health which women inflict upon themselves’” (42). Doctors were not so concerned with the quality-of-life women faced, but rather how stupid they could be to make themselves unattractive.

Logically, attractive women were more likely to gain the attention of a man, get married, and become pregnant. Doctors and scientists of the time believed while men were strong and intelligent, women were frail and dumb. Diagrams of women’s skeletons were portrayed with wide hips and tiny skulls, adding to the idea women were biologically built for giving birth and remaining intellectually inferior to men (Comen 38). Gustav Le Bon, a French anthropologist, wrote of women’s inferiority in 1879, dubbing women “‘the most inferior forms of human evolution’” and “‘closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man’” (38). Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle viewed women as biologically mutilated version of men, whose genitalia was “turned outside in” (Schoch, Cleghorn). However, Dr. Elinor Cleghorn, author and historian, notes, “Women also possessed an organ of the highest biological—and social—value: the uterus. Possession of this organ defined the purpose of women: to bear and raise children.” Men viewed women as unintelligent savages whose sole purposes were to be pretty and have their children, so of course the medical advice they handed women would play into those ideas. Thus, women’s health care became based on patriarchal assumptions about what was good for them, or rather, what was good for the patriarchy.

            The reduction of women as walking fetus incubators reflects a misogynistic, patriarchal system which has permeated the field of medical research to this very day. Medical research has historically excluded pregnant women and women simply with the capability of pregnancy. An FDA policy which put restrictions on who could take part in medical studies in 1977 denied not only pregnant women, but also women of “childbearing potential” (Dusenbery 30). It didn’t matter if a woman planned to become a mother or not, either way, she was not a valid subject for medicine trials. This may seem to make perfect sense on the surface, because after all, the image painted by the thought of using pregnant women for research guinea pigs without kindness to the health of her unborn child is horrific. However, as Dusenbery puts it, “With little actual research to go on, doctors are simple guessing at how drugs will affect a pregnant body, and their best predictions can be disastrously off” (39). In an effort to avoid harm to a pregnant woman and her child, feeding her medicine not actually tested on pregnant women may result in that very thing.

            Pregnant women are not the only demographic excluded from medical research. Rather, almost every woman has been historically excluded. The very core of the whole issue happens to be the fact doctors diagnose hysteria or over-concern because they still do not know what real diagnosis or treatment to give women. In a 2021 study about women with bleeding disorders, written by nine Canadian doctors who work closely with the topic, one major barrier to finding treatment was a general lack of awareness. Participants of the study “frequently expressed that they felt their conditions were poorly understood by [health care providers]” (Sumedha et al.). One woman, anonymously labeled S11, shared, “I said to my nurse ‘Are there any studies going on? Is there anything that we could do to help?’ and she looked at me and said, ‘With your position with hemophilia, you would know better than I what studies were going on.’ And I burst into tears” (Sumedha et al.) S7, another woman suffering from Von Willebrand disease, which is found in both men and woman but “is disproportionately severe in women” (Comen 110) said she heard her nurses and doctor Googling her diagnosis from behind a curtain (Sumedha et al.). The doctors these women sought out knew very little about their conditions or had never even heard of them. Bleeding disorders, their presence and effect on women, is only one example of under researched medical conditions that has taken a toll.

            The issue with men dominating the research field means they are more likely to research male health issues, and men’s health issues are not always the same as women’s. For example, not all men have periods. According to the World Health Organization, endometriosis is estimated to affect about 190 million women and girls around the world and is characterized by “severe pain in the pelvis, especially during menstrual periods.” Beyond pelvic pain, women may also experience “painful intercourse, infertility, GI issues, urinary tract infections, incontinence, and more” and can take over seven years to diagnose (Comen 311). Endometriosis is more than just an unfortunate condition: it is also incredibly painful. However, most women would describe their periods as painful or uncomfortable (Dusenbery 219), and so even when someone’s periods are “so painful and heavy that she can barely move” like “Dana’s” (Comen 310) or causes someone to start “writhing on a hospital bed, weeping, doubled over in pain” like “Emilia’s” (312), doctors are inclined to say it is perfectly normal. It is not normal. The only normal thing about it is the lack of knowledge regarding it and doctors’ frequent dismissal of it. Shannon Cohn, a documentary filmmaker and activist who gave a TEDx talk in 2017, calls it “the most common devastating disease on the planet that most people have never heard of” (Dwass 98). Comen refers to endometriosis as “One of the most crippling and least understood conditions affecting women’s health” (311). Ceana Nezhat, part of a Stanford gynecologist team, wrote “‘One of the most colossal mass misdiagnoses in human history, one that over the centuries has subjected women to murder, madhouses, and lives of unremitting physical, social, and psychological pain’” in the 2012 article Fertility and Sterility (Backman; Comen 311). The misunderstandings of women’s reproductive health run deep, and endometriosis is the prime example. It was known as “‘the career woman’s disease’ with the medical consensus being that it stemmed from the stresses of professional life” in the 1970s and 80s (Comen 312). Only in recent past is light being shed on this startlingly common disease, as research which was previously unfathomable can get underway.

            Another reproductive concept which seemed to confuse men in relation to women was sex and the complications thereof. Vaginismus is the involuntary contraction of the vaginal muscles, causing intense pain to the point that sexual intercourse is either excruciating or impossible (Comen 307; National Health Service). In the 1800s, physicians’ beliefs regarding its actuality ranged from “a real albeit frustratingly intractable problem” to “skeptical that it existed at all” (Comen 307). Either way, doctors were quiet concerned about the effect it had on their partners, not the patients themselves. The husbands of these women who suffered vaginismus were unhappy their wives were unable to offer them sex. As Comen puts it, “Physicians who exerted themselves to treat vaginismus tended to view it less in terms of the misery it caused to their female patients and more in terms of the frustration it caused their husbands” (307). The point then became not to relieve the woman’s suffering, but to achieve the goal of copulation. One case treated by James Marion Sims in the late 1800s, a famous American physician credited with the title ‘Father of Modern Gynecology,’ described the solution to be “to drug the woman with ether so that her husband could have sex with her unconscious body” (Comen 307). The study also reportedly took great care to point out the sexual competence of the man, “going out of its way to assure the reader ‘that it was not the fault of the husband that the vaginismus did not yield to penetration and dilatation’” (Comen 308). Great measures of language were taken to establish that the problem originated with the woman, with the resolution to sedate her so she might conceive a child. Note this is only a solution who came from those who even believed in the existence of vaginismus, and the condition remains in a limbo of unawareness to this day. According to Comen, the DSM labels it as a psychiatric condition (309), and when visiting the National Health Service’s page about it, listed causes include “anxiety or fears about having sex” and “believing sex is shameful or wrong.” Women’s reproductive health remained a mystery for years, the reverberations of which are felt as recently as 2024, and these reproductive issues were often only treated, if at all, when they impacted the men around them. What doctors knew and taught one another for decades was based on the studies conducted only when the conditions were troublesome to the people who did not directly experience it, leaving it misunderstood, mistreated, and under researched.

            Endometriosis and vaginismus are conditions primarily characterized by terrible pain, but because that pain also inconvenienced men via its effect on sexual intercourse, there was certainly some, although incredibly poor, attention brought to it. Another group of pain inducing conditions, autoimmune disorders, also went overlooked for quite some time. Women make up 80-95 percent of autoimmune disorder patients (Comen 214) and makes it into the top ten causes of death in women below the age of 65 (Dusenbery 139). However, like many illnesses in women, autoimmune disorders were written off as hysteria since its discovery in the early 1900s (139). Women being told they’re crazy is old news by now, so it should be no surprise to learn that research endeavors to treat it are few between. According to Dusenbery, the NIH had only recently “Devoted about $820 million annually to research autoimmune diseases. By comparison, cancer research gets over six times that much” (143). Those numbers are from around 2018, and one can imagine how massively underfunded those research efforts were prior. Comen shares the story of a woman, “Leora,” who was diagnosed with lupus in 1973, and her doctor, Michael Lockshin, who advised her not to become pregnant (213). In what came as quite a shock to the doctor, Leora demanded he “‘Prove it’” (213). It was only then, as Lockshin told Comen, that he began looking for answers and found “that the common medical wisdom was incomplete or even inaccurate” (Comen 215). He claimed he attended a Harvard conference about lupus and pregnancy, “‘And basically, I ended up figuring out that no one knew what they were talking about’ … ‘They didn’t understand the disease’” (Comen 215). As it turned out, medical practitioners simply guessed women with the lupus autoimmune disorder should not be pregnant and it became the advice to hand out to women for years. Instead of taking the time and effort to study the affliction, doctors were making assumptions. It has since been discovered lupus afflicted women can indeed safely bear children “with proper monitoring by a physician” and Michael Lockshin is now the director emeritus of the Barbara Volcker Senter for Women and Rheumatic Disease, based in New York at the Hospital for Special Surgery (Comen 215). Women were given medical advice for a disorder that turned out not to be true. Trained physicians, the experts women wanted to trust, made blind presumptions about their conditions and it resulted in decades of mistakes. Still, not a new story.

            Although autoimmune disorders disproportionately effect women, their diagnosis in women seems to be skewed in the opposite direction. According to Dusenbery, multiple global studies conducted in China, Finland, Australia, and Germany in the early 2010s found some women experienced up to a ten-year delay between showing symptoms of autoimmune disorder and being diagnosed (148). Compare this to the mean between both men and women. The National Health Council claims, on average, all autoimmune patients “visit four different providers over 4.5 years before receiving a diagnosis and beginning a treatment plan” (Murray). Even though many autoimmune disorders are stereotyped as “women’s diseases”, men face a much shorter delay in diagnosis comparably (Dusenbery 149). Women deal with autoimmune issues far more than men, however, their treatment is incredibly delayed. In fact, “Women are 80 percent more likely to suffer from autoimmune disorders than men” and according to Comen, doctors still do not know the reasons (214). There might not be a lack of causal understanding if they started studying it earlier rather than make baseless assumptions. As usual, women suffer the consequences of delayed treatment and false advice.

            In the past, men were of the opinion women were weak-minded and tender-hearted. The latter half of that statement is somewhat true, although not at all in the way they believed. With great impact, heart disease has been massively stereotyped as a “man’s disease” (Al Hamid et al.; Comen 102; Dusenbery 118). The American Heart Association held its very first conference geared towards women in 1964; It was called “Hearts and Husbands: The First Women’s Conference on Coronary Heart Disease” (Comen 104; Dusenbery 110). Although the AHA might have thought the title sounded progressive, one can guess it had nothing to do with heart disease in women. Instead, it “instructed how women in how to attend to (or manipulate) the men in their lives to live a heart-healthy lifestyle” (Comen 104). The first real conference about women with heart disease themselves wouldn’t be until 1989, and in 2016, the organization would declare “That despite some progress over the last two decades, heart disease ‘remains understudied, underdiagnosed, and undertreated in women’” (Dusenbery 110). The effects of this lack of research is felt to a truly concerning degree. The Centers for Disease Control notes “Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States”, the source of “1 in every 5 female deaths.” Although heart disease is not an uncommon condition, a 2024 study conducted by nine physicians and scientists pointed out “Women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed with a heart attack even though they carry the same risk of developing CVD as men” (Al Hamid et al.). Despite cardiovascular disease and heart attacks effecting millions of people every year, both men and women, women struggle to be correctly diagnosed. Scientists and doctors did notice the discrepancy eventually, but it took them a long time.

            The source of the discrepancy stems from 1800s and 1900s doctors’ belief that women simply did not get heart attacks. The ‘classic’ heart attack symptoms were identified primarily in men, including chest pain and pain in the left arm (Dusenbery 119). These sort of symptoms everyone recognizes today, however, they had strong connotations in the past. As Comen describes “Heart attacks in particular were meant to be understood as linked not just to maleness but to masculinity, particularly tragic in their tendency to strike down a particular breed of virile, hardworking man in the prime of his adult life” (102). So, while dying from a heart attack was the manly, powerful thing to do, women were permitted to experience minor heart palpitations. Doctors diagnosed women with cardiac arrhythmia, a product of “emotional unbalance” (Comen 103) or “pseudo angina”, meaning false chest pain (Comen 102). The consensus was ‘heart disease does not exist in women, and when it appears to, they are lying.’ Even when they die from it, apparently.

            The truth of the matter was overlooked for decades: men and women show different heart attack symptoms. While men more frequently feel the sharp chest and arm pain, women’s tells are more “atypical” (Comen 105; Dusenbery 119). Women’s symptoms include neck, leg, throat, shoulder, or upper back pain; shortness of breath; nausea and/or vomiting; sweating; and lightheadedness, dizziness, or cognition issues (Doner; Dusenbery 119). These symptoms, however, may appear milder in comparison to the pain most men feel during a heart attack, and so it becomes easier to misdiagnose women with stress or a panic attack. Most doctors have been taught to look for the signs typical in men patients, not women. Research efforts have reflected this. The first medical trial to find a link between cholesterol and heart disease was in 1982, consisting of 12,866 participants, all male (Comen 104). Another study from 1995 regarding the effect aspirin had on heart attack reduction also had only men (104). Now, with the lack of supporting research and a background of hysteria to prop it up, women’s efforts to be diagnosed are an uphill battle. Dusenbery states a series of studies conducted by psychologist Gabrielle R. Chiaramonte in 2007 involved doctors reading the vignettes of patients, each with heart attack symptoms that were considered typical (122). One half of the hypothetical patients were accurately diagnosed; however, the other half of the vignettes had been tacked with an additional symptom: stress (Chiaramonte 122). Apparently, “When the note about stress was added, an enormous gender gap suddenly appeared. Only 15 percent of the doctors diagnosed heart disease in the woman…and only 30 percent referred the woman to a cardiologist” (Chiaramonte 122). Once doctors become aware of the presence of mental factors, they are far quicker to dismiss the issue. This issue still impacts the women of 2024, preventing them from quickly receiving the urgent care they need. Abdullah Al Hamid et al.’s cardiovascular disease study from this year shows “Women were offered less diagnostic tests…were referred to less to cardiologists and/or hospitalization. Furthermore, if hospitalized, women were less likely to receive a coronary intervention.” It has been proven that women do get heart attacks, they do experience different symptoms, and those symptoms have been identified. Yet they still struggle to achieve medical attention.

            The ideal solution, then, should be obvious: teach doctors the correct information, based on inclusive research done on women. Unfortunately, that goal is not yet especially reachable, or at least not easily attained very soon. The restrictive 1977 FDA policy that prevented nearly all women from participating in clinical trials was eventually lifted, however, scientists still hesitated to include them. Some believed “Women were so different from men that including women would destroy the homogeneity of the study population and ‘confuse’ the results” (Dusenbery 31). At the same time, others had the view “Apart from their reproductive systems, men and women were so alike that any findings derived from studying the former would be perfectly valid for the latter” (Dusenbery 31). Both claims are directly contradictory, and poor excuses for an issue that has resulted in the harm, distress, and deaths of countless women. The inclusion of women in more research is the best progress one can hope for, however, not only is the end goal still a long way out, it is also difficult to achieve through individual means. The process is a slow one which must happen on a large scale, implemented by the people who have the power to do so.

            Thankfully, ordinary women do not have to sit around to wait for legislation or mass change to make a difference for themselves. Some women have found success in finding support online and with advocacy groups. One woman Dusenbery spoke to, who was feeling alone and afraid with her medical diagnosis, discovered an online group of 3,000 others “Ready to share their advice and doctor recommendations” (281). Women can also find organizations to help with their medical needs. WomenHeart is an organization with the goal to “Improve the lives of women with or at risk for heart disease while fighting for equity in heart health” and their website offers a multitude of resources for seeking diagnosis and treatment from trusted physicians and connecting with other women in similar situations. Much of women’s medical health throughout history made progress thanks to the women who advocated with one another. Dusenbery quotes and activist, “‘It was advocacy by individual women, groups of women, and the women in positions of power…who really brought forward the concept of women’s health’” (57). The voices of a collective are as strong as the sum of its parts, and can make an impact what will help speed the train of progress along.

            On an even smaller scale, women can take care of just themselves to benefit their quality of well-being. Both WomenHeart and Mayo Clinic recommend self-advocacy on their websites. In a Mayo Clinic article by Kalia Doner, the steps to take include “Pay attention to what your body is telling you,” “Make sure your doctor listens to you,” “Ask questions about your treatment — and then ask more questions,” and “Enlist support from friends, family and women’s heart-health groups.” Dusenbery requested advice from the doctors she interviewed for her book, and “Many…also encourage women to become well-informed, educated health care consumers” (317). To be a self-advocate, women should be as informed of their conditions as possible, whatever they may be, so they have a better understanding of the care they need. It involves speaking to multiple trustworthy doctors, asking many questions, and finding support from others. Women know themselves well enough to realize they are not hysterical, nor are they set props in a patriarchal society, nor are they unworthy of strengthening medical knowledge. They have the power to change everything over time.

            When I began looking into this topic, I had no idea how deep it really was. I previously possessed only a vague notion of its existence, and knew it needed to change, however, I was not aware of the massive scope. Now I know, without a doubt, the sheer roots of the issue and how desperately women need the aforementioned solutions. Luckily, the solutions are working, if slowly, and more people are becoming aware of the problem. A very recent report from December 2024 released by the UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee has acknowledged the research field’s long past of “medical misogyny.” Sarah Owen, Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee and Labour commented “This report must act as a wake-up call and the NHS must urgently implement a training programme to improve the experience of treatment and diagnosis of reproductive health conditions” (Medical Misogyny). As more authorities become aware of the issue, and as more women advocate both individually and together, it will begin to improve. It may take many more years of effort and gradual change before the progress is especially beneficial, however, for the sake of women’s health and lives, we must keep fighting.

 

Works Cited

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Al Hamid, Abdullah, et al. “Gender Bias in Diagnosis, Prevention, and Treatment of Cardiovascular Diseases: A Systematic Review.” Cureus, 2024. DOI: 10.7759/cureus.54264. Accessed 24 Nov. 2024.

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Arya, Sumedha, et al. “They don’t really take my bleeds seriously”: Barriers to Care For Women With Inherited Bleeding Disorders.” Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, vol. 19, no. 6, 2021, pp. 1506–1514, DOI: 10.1111/jth.15311. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

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Backman, Isabella. “Changing the Trajectory of a Painful Systemic Disease” Yale Medicine Magazine, vol 172. Spring 2024, medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/endometriosis/. Accessed 16 Dec. 2024.

Cardoso, Lena, et al. “Insurance Barriers, Gendering, and Access: Interviews with Central North Carolinian Women About Their Health Care Experiences” The Permanent Journal, 24 Feb. 2021. DOI:10.7812/TPP/20.176. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

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Cleghorn, Elinor. “Medical Myths About Gender Roles Go Back to Ancient Greece. Women Are Still Paying the Price Today” TIME, 17 June 2021, www.time.com/6074224/gender-medicine-history/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

Cohn, Shannon. “The Most Common Disease You’ve Never Heard Of.” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 8 March 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLCeQyxVWB8.

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