Aston sought medical help after her symptoms—which included severe migraines, abdominal pain, joint dislocations, easy bruising, iron deficiency, fainting, tachycardia, and multiple injuries—began in 2015, per the New Zealand Herald. She was referred to Auckland Hospital, where a doctor accused her of causing her own illness. Because of his accusations, Aston was placed on psychiatric watch.
Research suggests women are often much more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. A 2009 study of patients with heart disease symptoms found 31.3 per cent of middle-aged women “received a mental health condition as the most certain diagnosis”, compared to just 15.6 per cent of their male counterparts. Additionally, a 2020 study found that as many as 75.2 per cent of patients with endometriosis—a painful disorder that affects the tissue of the uterus—had been misdiagnosed after they started experiencing endometriosis symptoms. Among those women, nearly 50 per cent were told they had a “mental health problem”.
I was thinking about this sentence for a while before commenting and I ended up deciding that I disagree.
For me, the issue isn’t that the doctor is male. Even women that have been through regular GYN visits and even births wouldn’t be able to describe their body parts and functions beyond just the outside parts - if they weren’t educated about this. And most doctors are probably healthy people that do not have those kinds of symptoms so they would be able to reference it.
So when we educate both male and female doctors about the human body of both genders, I tend to believe the knowledge is equal.
But if that’s the case, then it could mean a few things. First, it would mean that women are being misdiagnosed often by both genders. I’ve read many threads in TwoX in reddit before, and it seems to be the case - there are a lot of stories of female doctors who also dismiss women’s symptoms. There are also stories of male doctors who did not dismiss them as well, so it’s not really based on their gender.
And secondly, it means the problems comes from elsewhere. It could be lack of research on female patients, or generally a lack of full understanding of women’s bodies that contribute to it - I’m not educated enough to make a factually correct statement here. But this is my opinion: this happens because of our culture. Doctors are not immune to it, and in many cultures in the US and Europe, women are often viewed as dramatic, bitchy, vengeful, drama queens, exaggerating, and flat out attention seekers to the point of lying.
This view is ingrained into many people from childhood. It is very hard for a person to even notice that the culture is skewing their point fo view on women. You can see it everywhere in media.
Since that affects doctors (of both genders), I think they tend to use this skewed view of women when they diagnose them. I’m sure it happens subconsciously and they don’t mean it, but that’s what hapoens. And if you just assume the person complaining about stuff is lying or exaggerating and is just a drama queen, you tend to downplay their complaints, which usually ends up in a dismissal. Case in point - the girl in the article.
So how do we fix this? We need to make sure more doctors are aware of this. Increase awareness of women specific illnesses, even rare ones. Find more ways to test women for possible causes for the symptoms they complain about. Increase difficulty for doctors to dismiss a woman’s complaints (e.g. a doctor must refer to a second opinion first, for instance). Take women’s complaints to the board (like Aston did in the article) much, much more seriously and make sure the responsible doctor is discouraged from repeating this behavior, and so on.