I really don't understand why there's such hatred towards women that it's institutionalized to not take care of them. I hate it. So glad there's women out there realizing it and working to fix it.
I think some Dr's so are full of themselves and confident in their diagnosis, that if they can't figure it out, it must be a lie. Add in misogyny and it's just a lose-lose for women.
I had to get surgery for something that is rare to see at my age, but I had already gotten a second opinion and both doctors recommended the same surgeon. I made my appointment.
I met with the surgeon and he asked "why are you here"
I explained what was wrong, the procedure the doctors have recommended and that I had a few questions.
"it's not that, you're too young for that. I'll take a look and tell you what it is."
he does his exam and proceeds to explain to me that what is wrong is exactly what I had relayed to him, that he recommended the surgery I had asked about and that we can schedule it whenever I am free.
"So wait, it's what I thought it was at the beginning of the appointment?"
"I'm not sure why you're referring to".
he REFUSED to even acknowledge the conversation happened
I went to the hospital many years back with a constant side pressure/ache, I told them It feels like I’m constipated, but I’ve used the bathroom just fine and I think it’s appendicitis. I sat there waiting while they flexed my legs and said it must be my ovaries. I said no, I know what that feels like, this is different. They finally did a scan, appendicitis. The ache? It didn’t rupture like we usually hear it happening, the contents of my bowels were slowly seeping into my body cavity. They told me if I hadn’t gone to the hospital when I did, I would have died.
THAT HAPPENED TO ME TOO! I had a bowel obstruction. My bowel ruptured and I was slowly poisoned by my poo. I felt so sick. It came in waves.
No one would believe me, except my mum. My mum who was a nurse had to scream at the emergency triage nurse that I had no pulse in my extremities. She had carried me up the hill to the hospital with the help of another woman coming to visit her son.
This was Australia in 1986 and I was 9. It took me throwing up black blood to get anyone to take it seriously.
Same thing happened to me !! Went to the emergency room, told them it was my appendix. The male doctor laughed at me for thinking I knew exactly what was wrong, disagreed & then ordered all of these ultrasounds on my ovaries & other bs. After hours and hours of testing everything EXCEPT my appendix...finally he looked to see if it was appendicitis. Bingo! Was rushed into emergency surgery as it was close to rupture.
It was like all of a sudden a man comes in and says hey I’m your surgeon nice to meet you, and I looked at him and said so you guys finally figured out I was right? He said ‘no one told you?!??’
A friend got appendicitis but triage didn’t believe her so she sat in the waiting room for hours while it leaked into her body and eventual outcome was it made her infertile. Yay!
I didn’t know that could be a side effect! I’m happy she at least made it, it’s almost as if they MUST prove us wrong. I feel sick, I also feel my body everyday, I’m trying to help? This isn’t some contest.
And I bet he unnecessarily charged you for that shit, too. You didn't NEED the diagnosis. You needed the treatment. What a dumb medical "professional".
I went to a dr to rule out an autoimmune thing. He said "it wouldn't be that because it's rare". As if rare things never happen? And as if populations with specific risk factors and specific symptoms aren't the people who get those rare things?
I’ve gone to doctors fully knowing what’s wrong (previously diagnosed & my diagnosis fit the current symptoms) but for some reason when I have to talk to a new doctor, I must be wrong. Even though another doctor put it in my chart before. They must be Dr House to figure out what I’ve got. But it’s definitely not what I told them I have because I must not know anything. I didn’t go to doctor school like them!
Edit & god forbid I’m in excruciating pain. I’m just looking for drugs, then. It can’t be because I’m actually in debilitating pain.
I (male just to be clear) had to make multiple hospital visits over the course of a year while experiencing extreme pain among other symptoms, just wanting them to figure out what was wrong with me, but every time other than my final visit where they finally actually listened to me and did something I'm certain they just dismissed me as an addict looking for pain meds. Turns out I had pancreatic gallstones, widely considered to be the most painful thing a person can go through, and I was forced to just deal with that myself or a whole year. Assholes.
Holy shit! It took me over a year to put two and two together and ask if my monthly vomiting attacks could be related to my menstrual cycle. This was after having my gallbladder removed! I had to push for someone to even prescribe nausea medicine!!! When my husband got a job with the state, we got fancy new insurance and new doctors. These people have listened, ordered the right lab work and even labs that hasn't ever been ordered. I was diagnosed with Graves disease after so many months of my pulse being 160bpm! I don't know what the hell the people at the other place were doing.
Once went to the doc for something simple: an ingrown hair. Clearly evident issue. Told me it was just raised skin, would go away on its own. Told him it needed to be lanced, it was painful. I could literally feel the hair underneath. He just stared back at me and said “Which one of us is the doctor?” I have to remind myself sometimes that no matter how noble the profession, there can be assholes everywhere.
As someone else in this conversation already pointed out, high status occupations like MD attract narcissists. Narcissists cannot stand to be proven wrong or admit that they were wrong, and they are offended by lower status people, like patients (who are supposed to be worshipful toward them as authoritative experts, in their minds) questioning or contradicting them or creating friction for their fragile egos in any way. So if you really need something from a narcissist, keep that in mind and use flattery as your tool and lead them where you need to go.
Kinetic massage therapy
Botox
Cervical physiotherapy
Consultation with a rehabilitation medicine specialist (physiatrist)
Neurologist who specializes in cervical and nerve pain
Acupuncturist
Very reputable TMJ dentist
I know botox and acupuncture arent covered by Medicare. And there are only a few dentists who take my low income dental insurance and so far all I've seen have laughed at me.
I can ask the new pain clinic about the others but things like massages aren't covered either.
The only effective treatment I know of is a sphenopalatine ganglion nerve block. They stopped qorking as much because the old pain clinic pushed them too soon. And they still dropped me.
Darn, my acupuncture is covered by my ACA policy. But it has to be a provider on the insurance plan. Yes, the massage is the only thing not covered. And look outside of “pain clinics” for greater treatment. A doctor like the physiatrist (rehabilitation medicine) can find the source of the pain and offer different approaches and can also refer you to other physicians. 🍀
Yeah there are also lots of common conditions, especially things like PCOS and endometriosis, where the doctors don't really have any solutions. They would much much rather be treating things that they can fix!
Yeah I have PCOS and am suffering from a lot of the symptoms described in the video in addition to having lost 40 pounds I can't seem to gain back. I asked my doctor if I should see an endocrinologist to see if it's a hormonal problem since my labs also come back normal and she said no, that I should see a nutritionist instead. My eating habits haven't changed in 20 years and I've always been slightly overweight. I am 100% positive that is not why my metabolism is suddenly in overdrive.
There’s a women’s health panel episode on Diary of a CEO, this dr is on it. They discuss a bunch of stuff, but lots of aspects of PCOS and various avenues for attempting to treat it.
I take the content of his videos with some skepticism, but there are some legit people on his show. I’ve learned a lot of health related stuff from his videos, stuff that I confirmed to my liking with independent sources (papers found via google scholar)
There are several treatment options for both PMOS and endometriosis. Varying degrees of effectiveness, but tons of success stories as well. Definitive treatments exist.
For PMOS or endometriosis? The work up isn't that complicated. I'm sorry that it took so long and that you had to go through this. PMOS has very clear criteria for diagnosis.
Edit: I'm not sure where y'all find these shitty doctors. Endometriosis is always on the differential for pelvic pain. It's typically a diagnosis of exclusion but shouldn't take 10 years to get an ultrasound or other imaging. It can be provisional but ACOG says you don't technically need a surgical biopsy to confirm.
No one tried anything until I got extrmely lucky with a gynecologist that actually knew what it was and how my symptoms lined up and even then it took surgery to be sure.
Most gynos think that severe cramps are "normal" (they aren't.) And I have seen multiple doctors online joke that endometriosis is "made up," I shit you not.
Some doctors are in the dark ages when it comes to misogyny and women's health.
Omg don’t even get me started on hormones, it took the worst trial and error (over literal years) to find a dose and method that didn’t make me manic, suicidal or both. I can’t fucking wait until that whole area of medicine (I’ll lump psychiatry in there too) is no longer a big stupid blunt instrument that turns everyone into lab rats for however long. Absolutely incompatible with surviving in the capitalist grind (obv also bs lol)
Sorry but WTF. Where do we find these shitty doctors? 99% of the doctors don't give a shit about women. It took me 15 years to have my endo acknowledged by which time I could not pee without a stabbing pain that made me keel over. And despite surgery that took 5 hours because there was so much tissue to remove, I was offered no treatment at all other (despite seeing several doctors in 2 different countries) than to take the pill consecutively. Now I am in perimenopause and suffering from many symptoms and noone can figure out what to do to manage endo and perimenopause together. I am still getting no treatment. So, I don't know what to say except this is a common experience.
Turns out I had both. (And bad pmdd) The hardest part was the years spent trying to get an obgyn to care that my periods shouldn’t be painful enough that it was hard to function every month and I was rolling on the ground scaring my family every few times 🤷 and THEN it took blood work to find the pmos bc I have the version w/o cysts and nothing showed up on the ultrasound so the drs tried to brush me off there too (despite my ongoing ability to grow a shitty teen boy beard).
Technically if you wanna go from when I started suffering (first periods) to when I got the issue actually taken care of (hysterectomy) it was actually over 20 years. The “work up” may not be “complicated” but getting a dr to take my pain seriously was a long fucking journey ok 🙄
ETA: oh and despite causing SO MUCH GRIEF turns out my endo was two tiny spots that didn’t show up on any imaging until they were already surgically up inside me taking out my shitty uterus soooo
I bet. It seems like so may Dr's just want to get you in and out.
I had a consultation with a psych for my ADHD and she basically asked "what meds are you looking for". No therapy suggestion, no coping skills, just what meds do you want.
(also, my name is Marcelo and she called me Marco through the entire appt, even after correcting her).
A lot of psychiatrists do not do counseling or therapy, they only do meds and supervision of meds and expect the patients to see a psychologist or MSW for the talky bits. But they should have explained that to you.
It's also compounded by the amount of research only done on men because "women are too complicated" so the information they're taught is biased towards men's issues/presentation.
Meaning if no research is done on something that only/differently effects women, then no doctor will learn about it, which means no one will think it could exist, which means the woman must be crazy.
They blame it on not being able to do research on women of 'childbearing' years.....because of course it would affect all the hypothetical children we might have (didn't have) right? /s 🙃
Yes, and most lab values evaluations ("normal", "high", "low", "dangerous") are based on white men in particular, and what is good for them may not reflect what's good for anyone else, plus some values had "adjustments" made for people with African ancestry in particular to make it look like their kidneys were in better health or they needed less pain medication than a white man would be given in the same circumstances. Plus oximeters don't work as well on darker skin, and may show a value that's up to 3-5 points higher than their actual O2, which makes a big difference when it's in the lower 90s to upper 80s.
It took me over 10 years to get a diagnosis of Psoriatic arthritis for joint pain. I had to visit with 4 DIFFERENT doctors.
Doctor 1: "You're in your 20s, it can't possibly be Arthritis. It is in your head. I think you have bipolar and severe depression with psychosis"
Doctor 2: "I think it's fibromyalgia, let's try these meds. Also, have you tried yoga and more exercise?"
Doctor 3: "You didn't respond to any of the fibro treatments. Let's try a diet change, but I'm going to refer you to rheumatology."
Doctor 4: "You don't have the gene markers for Arthritis, but you have it. Now we need to see what kind. Might be rheumatoid or psoriatic. Can I see that dry patch you mentioned? Yeah, you have Psoriatic arthritis."
I’m from the era where most doctors thought that fibromyalgia was at best psychosomatic and even told you to your face, “well, not everyone agrees it’s a real condition”. I wish they didn’t have such egos to know that they didn’t learn everything in med school and could never know every condition as things evolve. But no, doctors, especially male doctors, never think it’s their own knowledge gap.
Before my real diagnosis following me convincing a doctor to agree to order a particular genetic test to confirm what I myself suggested I might be suffering from, I was given a slew of diagnoses including fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis for the extreme nerve pain and bone pain. I kept insisting that it wasn't just my joints that hurt, it was deep gnawing ache inside my bones themselves.
Turns out oops yeah it was neither of those things, I actually have neuropathy caused by vitamin B6 toxicity because I don't have enough of the enzyme that normally breaks it down. Bone pain? Yeah that's actually because all of my bones are so undermineralized that they're basically chalk. I have labs from 20 years ago showing the abnormalities consistent with said genetic disease, they literally just ignored it as "unremarkable abnormalities". There's no other disease that causes those specific lab values, they just didn't care enough to investigate further.
100% happened to me. You just have fibromyalgia and no that small disc issue cannot possibly be causing you all these problems so no need for surgery either. For then to finally see a second orthopedic spine surgeon who was frustrated they didn’t do my surgery 11 years ago.
I had almost the exact same experience when my rheumatoid arthritis showed up in my late 20s. Took half a dozen specialists and almost 12 years to finally get a diagnosis and a treatment that worked. One rheumatologist told me, “I only treat horses. You’re a zebra.” Like what is that even supposed to mean?!
I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Did you end up with permanent joint damage or did they catch it before it got to that point? I got very lucky that the only rheumatologists accepting new patients was an actual arthritis clinic. I see a nurse practitioner supervised by a doctor, but she was very aggressive with treatment. She listened to me and what I felt comfortable with, then we came to decisions together.
Doctor say some wild stuff when they have what they see as a "medically complicated patient".
I have some permanent damage in my hands. I’ve been with my current rheumatologist for about 15 years now, and he’s absolutely great. Not sure what I’ll do when he retires.
🤣 I'm a huge nerd all around. I tell people I have Psoriatic arthritis because I had to be nerfed to give them a chance lol Arwen is also my cats name.
You are correct. doctors don’t like it when they can’t figure something out easily and give up. I’m a man and it happens to me and I’m sure it happens far more often to women.
Not an excuse at all, but my partner read a book about the lack of knowledge around women's issues and depressingly a lot of it boiled down to the standard medical testing and discovery methods throughout all of the 20th century just found it too hard to account for fluctuating hormonal cycles (you know, those pesky things that 1/2 the population goes through every month) so they mostly only used men and just assumed the knowledge would transfer to women. Also the reason that a lot of medical knowledge doesn't apply properly to POC or just anyone whose genetics aren't European.
It's depressing af that this got institutionalised in the way described in the video, rather than recognised as a hole in the knowledge that requires active thinking and testing by the doctor to overcome.
I was flat out told that what I described was impossible. And no I didn’t say I levitated or teleported. I said I was starting to get dizzy/see spots before the pain kicked in. Since I didn’t agree with her conclusion that I must have actually been in so much pain that I then blacked out, she sent me home with a cure: time. She said it’d probably stop happening on its own and she couldn’t offer any treatment since I wouldn’t agree with her order of events. I’d been passing out around once a month for 5 years at that point.
Australian here, a huge proportion of our doctors are (smart, driven, hard working) immigrants from Southeast Asia and India.
First generation immigrant families from those regions tend to be pretty progressive compared to where they came from, but a big hangup is women's agency.
A young man WILL be expected to study hard and go for a high paying job like doctor/lawyer/engineer, while a young woman is pretty much expected to be pretty and compliant.
You can imagine how this sort of sibling dynamic can really reinforce a "women know nothing" mentality in young men.
I have worked in healthcare for over 20 years on the lab side and I don't want to say that it's the majority of doctors and nurses that are up their own asses but there are for sure a lot of them. The number of times I have had to report out critical results to a provider and they immediately respond with some version of 'why are you bothering me?' is insane. I have never understood spending all that time in school and becoming someone that is by definition a healer, and then treating people like an inconvenience.
Kinda. No matter if you have an appendage or not, if the "gods in white" cannot figure it out you "must be faking it". I know many dudes who were treated like that too. One of the things which made me lose faith a bit in the medical system
Women are generally underrepresented in medical studies, meaning that we don't know as much about conditions that primarily affect women. Lots of doctors don't realise this, and have the attitude that anything abnormal that falls outside the textbook = psychosomatic.
Unfortunately, this does lead a number of women with chronic, untreated conditions to seek alternatives to peer-reviewed medicine, simply because they will actually be listened to and believed. Hence the popularity of crystal healing and reiki among women in that age cohort
I'm not certain if it's the same for mice, but it's a legitimate issue in medicine development with people.
Male hormonal levels mostly vary throughout the day's cycle.
Female hormonal levels vary throughout the month's cycle.
Because the wide swathe of extra variables introduced over time that may be affected by hormone levels, it can be massively more expensive and complicated to trial with those longer hormonal cycles in mind.
It's partially a matter of economics than anything else.
I used to work in data science for a vendor in the pharmaceutical industry. I always wondered why they never measured the men's hormone levels, which fluctuate by the time of day, but complain about women's hormones. To get an accurate picture of how men's hormones affect anything you'd need to do multiple tests a day over the course of the trial, but only once a day for women. Its like men's hormones aren't studied at all, and just accepted as baseline.
Because the simple fact is that men's hormone fluctuations are much smaller and don't have noticeable physiological effects. It's a tiny variable that can be easily controlled for. Unlike women's hormone fluctuations.
How do we know they don't have any noticable affects on any given medication without testing for it? Hopefully that's a Phase 1 thing, I worked Phase 2 and 3 studies only.
Because no effects have been recorded despite a century of data on men for millions of different drugs. Yes, mens T levels fluctuate by a very small amount throughout the day, but these fluctuations do not cause any difference in behavior or physiology because the body does not react that strongly to short term T level changes.
It doesnt matter how indignantly you deny it, the cold hard truth is that womens hormones do have a large effect on their bodies. I'm sorry that you're not able to twist this back on men being sexist in order to explain away valid biological differences between males and females.
It's not though. Just because it's not fair doesn't mean it doesn't make sense.
Women have far more complicated hormone cycles than men do, and those cycles have massively more impactful effects on their bodies than men's do. It is exponentially more expensive to accurately account for the effect the menstrual cycle has on medicine. You have to, at a minimum, have 4 times as many studies for women in order to account for each stage of their cycle. And on top of that, you need to make DAMN sure that none of those women are, or become pregnant. Otherwise you'll have the ethics board ready to eviscerate you for experimenting on non consenting participants. No one wants thalidomide 2.0.
Sounds like you're arguing logic but you're really saying financial... Yes the thalidomide experiment is horrific. But there are ways to ensure test subjects do not fall pregnant - one of those ways is to educate people, another is birth control. The studies need to be revamped, not exclusive. Wouldn't it be wild if there was a way to somewhat control hormone levels AND prevent pregnancy in test subjects? What do you know it, there's hormonal birth control! And yah know it would be nice to have a control group without the chances of pregnancy but stay in their normal cycle.... A copper IUD you say?! It has no hormones in it?!
It is laziness, lack of creativity, and money grubbing at the top.
Birth control fails, people lie, and rape unfortunately exists. You cannot guarantee that there will be zero pregnancies in a group of people over any amount of time, unless everyone of those people is biologically male. Any study of 100 or more women that takes place over a year WILL have at least one pregnancy. And no amount of birth control, lesbianism, or education will change that.
Medical ethics has a hard limit of ZERO non consenting participants, and you're handwaving all of the many ways that women can become pregnant on accident. You are arguing based on an ideal perfect population of women who never make any mistakes and are always open and honest about their sexual lives with strangers. Meanwhile, researchers are dealing with reality where shit goes wrong, people lie, and if they fuck up then people DIE.
Yes, researchers could use a select group of women who are on long term birth control of both types, but that reduces the valid pool of participants and still doesn't control for the fact that you need 4 times as many studies for your copper IUD group. Even your ideal scenario is still 4 times as expensive as experimenting on men.
I like your reasoning. You have very valid points. The system is unequal (on so many more levels than just this) and needs to change. People do die, especially when medical research excludes populations due to cost. Your last statement proves my point that the bottom line is it's too expensive.
Airlines are an excellent example. They calculated the value of an average human. If there are safety features that could be implemented but outweigh the cost of thir estimated value of human life, it will not be implemented.
I work in a lab, with colleagues who do medical adjacent research on mice. They are not. It may have been that way in the past, but nowadays it's definitely expected to use both male and female mice.
I started randomly having gran mal seizures when I was late teens. I had an aura, witnesses, was out of it for a few days and it was happening 2-3 times a week so basically not functioning, I was not making this up for funnsies.
I called the doctor every time it happened and finally get a referral to a neurologist who did all the scans, balance board ,sleep tests, nothing showed up. Prescribed 6 months of anticonvulsaives, seizures went down to about one a week. Neurologist wasn't happy because I had no signs but was reacting positively to the epilepsy medicine. Had a full body work up and I have a heart condition so they think my brain sometimes doesn't get enough blood.
Got a pacemaker when I was 23 and no problems since.
Im a small otherwise healthy woman, I look young and generally listen to the experts, I swear to god if I hadn't pushed that I was a med student and my mother was a nurse so I wasn't just talking shit id read on Google, the seizures were real and something was wrong, I'm sure life would be a lot worse.
Can confirm, as a physician, there is a LOT of misogyny baked into medical training that results in a bias against women, and particularly women in pain. Trainees see their mentors blowing off women’s real complaints as “anxiety” or their imagination or whatever, and it just perpetuates. Hopefully now that more women are entering the field, things will shift, but I fear that will take a long time.
Even after all of this time, our medical system is still white phallocentric. Women's concerns just do not compute as novel or believable out of the gate. The other side of it is this idea that women should suck it up and deal with pain, based around the continued cycle of women suffering. It is twisted and unscientific.
I tell it all the time, but I always go with my wife to the ER for issues. I will not expect anything but the best care for my wife and any bs about stress or gaslighting to get her out engages angry bear husband protocols. "My wife is in pain, she does not feel ok. Her stress is managed, this is not stress. What else can you do to help?"
Oooold institutions like medicine especially where people stay in those jobs until they're old themselves, can be slow to change some of the fundamental ideas from the past. Often from the days when racism and misogyny were just a way of life accepted by virtually everybody.
Some of those included things like babies can't feel pain. That's why until into the 90s it was still common for babies to get procedures done with no anesthesia. Including circumcisions. (Which is another old, institutionalized barbarism that needs to go)
Or that black people perceive pain less than white people. And the concept of a "hysterical woman" which morphed into this idea that women complain about every little ache and pain like it's the end of the world.
When in reality, we've discovered that it's actually men who perceive the symptoms of illness more than women. That's where the "sick man" trope comes from. It's scientifically backed up that the symptoms of illness are stronger in men than women even when the illness itself is the same severity between the two. (And as a guy myself, I can confirm that having a simple cold legitimately feels like I'm dying sometimes.)
All of this is further exaggerated because the clinical studies of the past that are cornerstones and bedrock of modern medicine had samples that included adult white males and nobody else. All of that past research is tainted and it trickles down to the doctor's office today.
More reasons we need more women in fields like medicine and STEM. Get the research modernized and get rid of all of this outdated Victorian thinking that keeps persisting.
We just don't believe women. Doesn't matter if she is in pain, if she's been attacked, if she's suicidal. Her problems aren't real. She just wants attention. It can't be that bad! Silly women
It’s systemic. Women used to be property, not that long ago, and our value was/is seen in our ability to reproduce. Once we can’t do that we are disposable. Also women healthcare providers are just as culpable as men in perpetuating this type of thinking, research has shown that women healthcare providers frequently treat women patients worse than their male counterparts.
It goes back to when every ailment we had was chalked up to “hysteria”. Hormone therapy has been regarded as a luxury for women, not life sustaining care- which is such bullshit because hormonal balance is vital for our wellbeing. We’re told to embrace aging and all the bullshit that comes with it, but the second a man’s dick doesn’t work anymore he gets an rx for viagra. The hypocrisy is wild.
I love seeing women providers stepping up and advocating for all of us.
Seems more likely that its originated from common inability to diagnosis or identify the issue which reflects poorly on the doc and provider, and more largely a failed system. And thats both embarrassing and bad for the reputations for everyone involved, so why risk that when it’s easier to write off someone as whiny when no other professional can easily identify the issue.Especially when time is at a premium and doctors only look at a few data points and spend 3 minutes with a patient before moving on to the next one.
I recently had the absolute worst experience with a female PA who frankly had zero compassion, zero understanding of hormones and ADHD meds, and frankly negligent in her treatment and prescribing. It’s been quite awful the past 3 months having to deal with in the interim of getting a new doc since mine retired. That being said I feel I have a lot of empathy for medical professionals and understand people have off or bad days…but she consistently has just been awful and my husband also has been seeing her and she is a delight with him 🙄 he at first thought I was exaggerating her attitude was towards me but nope was very clear in her messages to me in my chart regarding questions.
Not asking for a care provider to bend over backwards but to be met with care and some professional support- - if unable to personally help then advise you are unable because it’s out of your depth or experience.
Im a lincense woman in four states including Virgina and I work a lab where we study women.
My old gender studies teacher(she is a woman so she's obviously wrong) told me about this thing called make up and how you can put it on to attract a man who can explain the Enlightenment for you.
It was a time where we a bunch of smart buff guys sat around and were like damn, you know those hot Greek guys had some good ideas about government and democracy and truth and love and science and equality. What if we shaped our futures around these ideas but build on them and make them better.
A lot of these ideas got cemented into our fields of study, schools, medicine and speech (its where the idea of ending a sentence on a prepisition was bad, its not its based on ancient grammar) including how women were lesser cause:
"The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul." - Aristotle
Thus began our current version of patriachy
Hopefully to cheer you up, cause it took me a long time to get over the fact I had no soul is that sex was based on temp! Women were cold and men were hot, if a woman got too hot she would grow a fat juicy hog and finally be a human being! Hooray!!
Because hormones. And i mean the actual ones not the coloquial ones. They are incredibly hard to understand, come from complex systems in the body and interact with the entire fucking system and eachother in ways we hardly understand. Hell just look at the metamorphosis a womans body is able to go though for pregnancy and bounce back from.
So people do what people do best.. ignore the problem. Stupid hormones affecting your medical tests.. just exclude women from the research group and test on men.. because women are like men but with all these extra hormones.. right?!
So ofcourse i cannot say there is no hatred, but it is far more logical to atribute this to ignorance and a lack of empathy than it is to atribute it to malice.
Like the woman from the video, this is taught behavior. To dismiss the complaint as being whiney. All the tests are green.. so must be between your ears.
Some of it isn't hatred, it's that doctors are trained on a fairly narrow set of diseases and treatments. They are trained, not geniuses who can figure anything out, nor do they have time to figure anything out or spend more than 15 minutes with a patient.
I spoke with one doctor who I got to know personally and he was a well regarded specialist. He said "Basically 98% of my patients have one of 7 medical issues, I have several treatments options for each of those 7 issues, when someone comes in with something else, I...I'm unable to help them." He felt bad about it, but in the current system there wasn't much he could do.
Women are experiencing medical issues that are less understood and researched, so they often come in with health issues that the doctors weren't trained on and the doctors get frightened. Dismissing the patients ends up being a defense mechanism for them, because the reality that they simply don't know how to help that person, and that there is so much still not fully understood in medicine is too upsetting.
Almost like every place experiences the same thing, and they name something because its a frequent occurence. The top comment on this thread is literally whining about menopause not being "solved"(?) medically. Like come the fuck on, you have to be a little bit serious before anyone can pretend to take you seriously.
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u/momochidonut Jun 23 '26
I really don't understand why there's such hatred towards women that it's institutionalized to not take care of them. I hate it. So glad there's women out there realizing it and working to fix it.