Why Are So Many Women Rejecting Medical Science? | Dame Magazine
▻https://www.damemagazine.com/2019/04/22/why-are-so-many-women-rejecting-medical-science
Women are habitually mistreated, misdiagnosed, and not even included in medical research. As a booming “wellness” industry lures them with fast cures, many can’t resist the temptation.
There are, obviously, many reasons for the growth of miracle cures and predatory medical treatments and their popularity among women. But one of the main causes is a failure of evidence-based medicine to properly study, understand, and treat women—or even to show them basic empathy. The lack of proper health care and even a basic understanding of women’s bodies has left women desperate for any possible treatment. Because why trust medical science when it ignores you and fails to treat your health seriously?
The first issue lies in quality of care. In interactions with doctors, patients, especially female patients, are often ignored or minimized when they try to talk about their health. A study in 2017, from the University of Florida in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic, which monitored conversations between 112 patients and their doctors found that, on average, the patients were only given 11 seconds to explain why they were seeking treatment before being interrupted. And that was for all patients, male and female.
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Now combine that with data about how women’s health and the health of women of color, specifically, are minimized and you get an even more grim picture. Here are just a few small examples: Women’s pain is often ignored or considered an overreaction—an older study (from 1990) found that when women are in pain after heart surgery they’re more often prescribed sedatives instead of pain medication and a study in 2008 found that in emergency rooms women report abdominal pain as often as men but on average are 7 percent less likely to receive pain treatment for it and are made to wait 16 minutes longer to get painkillers. The medical community has even coined a term for the fact that women receive different treatment after experiencing a heart attack than men do—called the “Yentl Syndrome” (referencing the Barbra Streisand film, in which a woman had to pose as a man in order to gain an education), it highlights the fact that women die after heart attacks more often than men because of improper and insufficient treatment.
So if research on women’s health is unreliable, and drugs to treat women’s health are nonexistent or have unknown side effects or efficacy, and doctors are barely listening to women then it’s difficult to make the argument to women that they should be avoiding treatments that aren’t scientifically proven. Because a logical response to that would be: What, exactly, has science done for me lately?
“It’s understandable that people are searching for answers in other places,” says Caulfield. “Enter the wellness industrial complex that is ready to provide unproven therapies for all of this stuff.”
After all, if women are desperate for any possible treatment, why not make money off them? It’s hard to argue with snake-oil salesmen who come riding into town with a covered wagon filled with ultra-wealthy beautiful celebrities like the Kardashians who are being paid to lie to you that their flat stomachs come from drinking tea.
#médecine #maltraitances_médicales #biais_genré #genre #femmes