Article: What do you do when your doctor doesn’t believe you’re in pain? [about endometriosis]

"Endometriosis is excruciating. But the medical scale for pain is tragically flawed, leaving women in particular to suffer


On a scale of zero to 10, with zero being no pain at all and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, how is your pain?

Because pain is impossible to diagnose objectively, doctors often refer to a chart of emoticons to understand how their patient is feeling. At the bottom of the chart is the frowniest of frowny faces: pure, unadulterated agony. At the top is a carefree and happy smiley face: no pain at all.

It’s called the pain scale, and it is tragically flawed. I would know: I suffer from endometriosis, so I am well acquainted with all the various ways doctors try to get you to measure suffering.

This self-reporting tool is otherwise known as the Numeric Rating Scale, which dates back to the origins of the opioid epidemic, when OxyContin was first approved in the mid-1990s and the American Pain Society developed the Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign initiative."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/15/pain-scale-women-endometriosis-period

 

I don’t think that one’s ability to imagine pain is necessarily bounded by previous experience of pain.

 

New article.

‘Gaslit by doctors’: UK women with endometriosis told it is ‘all in their head’

Women with endometriosis who have endured years of excruciating pain are being “fobbed off” by doctors and told their symptoms are “all in their head”, leading them to give up seeking NHS treatment, new research has found.

A study carried out by academics at Manchester Metropolitan University found women with the disease felt “gaslit” by doctors due to their lack of understanding of the condition.

The paper, due to be published in the Journal of Health Communication later this month, also found that treatment was subject to a postcode lottery. Patients in rural areas reported travelling for hours to access a specialist with full training in the complex gynaecological condition.

https://www.theguardian.com/society...th-endometriosis-told-it-is-all-in-their-head

 

I can give men some idea of what gynaecological pain and treatment might be like.

Imagine being 13 years old and the blood supply gets cut off to one of your testicles because it gets twisted. It would start to die immediately, and it wouldn't take long to start becoming necrotic. Now imagine that everyone - parents and doctors - thinks you are attention-seeking. So they ignore you and ignore your pain and don't treat it because - to them - there is nothing to treat except a hysterical, attention-seeking child. When your parents eventually take you to the doctor he asks how things are at school, and then tells you to lose weight because that testicle of yours has ballooned up to many times its normal size, so you must be fat.

Over the next month the testicle twists further until it is completely twisted all the way round twice.

Parents take you to the doctor multiple times over the month after the pain started but you get fobbed off every time. The parents still aren't convinced that your problem is real, and nor are the doctors.

Eventually you are admitted to hospital. You get your dead or dying testicle manipulated by a doctor who gets angry when you scream and refuse to let them do it again.

This story keeps going on and on and on - but I am describing what happened to me and it was an ovary involved not a testicle.

If you have ever wondered what it is like to have one of your internal organs dying and rotting I can assure you from personal experience that it is pain of the type that most people are never likely to experience.