Interview with Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick.
"On the most basic level, the fact that basically until the 1970s, there were essentially no women involved in medical practice or research. Certainly, I think that is the root problem, but I do think that one of my big takeaways from the research is the systemic problem I see, that I describe as a knowledge gap, where we just don’t have enough information and medical knowledge about women and their bodies and their conditions that disproportionately affect them. And then this trust gap, this tendency to not believe women’s reports of their symptoms."
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Journalist, Susannah Cahalan's misdiagnosis, highlighted in the Netflix documentary, Brain on Fire, illustrates a woman's fight to be heard in the doctor's office.
"...This kind of gender bias has been acknowledged – but unresolved– for decades. The author Gena Corea first published her investigative report on women’s treatment in the doctors’ offices in 1977. Corea highlighted that male doctors tended to perceive female patients as hysterical, believing that women could more freely express their emotions, while men could not. While today this binary of what constitutes “femininity” and “masculinity” is changing, the training that doctors receive is still biased." |