BBC News: "100 Women: I want to break the stigma of painful sex"

Andy

Andy

Retired committee member
Different problem, familiar story.
Callista finally worked up the courage to talk to a doctor about it when she was in her 20s. They did an examination and said she looked perfectly normal and that the pain must be psychological. So she went to see a counsellor, who told her the same thing.
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Eight years later and after seeing 20 different doctors, Callista finally found herself in front of a specialist who told her she had congenital neuroproliferative vestibulodynia. It meant she was born with 30 times the normal amount of nerve endings in the opening of her vagina - and she was able to have surgery to cure it.
......
Emily also wanted to tackle another aspect; why so many doctors said the pain was psychological. Emily spoke to some doctors she knew. One hadn't heard of vulvodynia and others had heard of it but weren't given much formal training on causes, diagnosis or treatment.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-42962348
 
Emily also wanted to tackle another aspect; why so many doctors said the pain was psychological.

This is the way doctors have been treating women with gynaecological problems of all sorts for centuries, millennia even. If they can't see a problem externally they take it for granted that the problem is psychological. They don't appear to need proof of this before pronouncing their verdict.

In more modern times, if they bother to delve more deeply with surgery the woman is at the mercy of the skill of the surgeon. If they (the surgeon) already believe the problem is psychological before they operate, and they are just going through the motions, they won't check thoroughly and they will make some outrageous mistakes.
 
Today as I was reading this article and pondering the usual 'psychological' diagnosis, I was on FB and there was a post from a UK osteoporosis group I am in, and 2 members discussing how they had both had their back pain issues down to 'all in the mind'.

One of them had cervical spondylosis. OP in the spine, and compression fractures (which it seems was already documented) and yet the Dr told them to wait and see for 8 weeks as it was likely to be 'stress'. The other one is now in a wheelchair having had his physical issues effectively ignored and not investigated.
 
Agapanthus said:
Today as I was reading this article and pondering the usual 'psychological' diagnosis, I was on FB and there was a post from a UK osteoporosis group I am in, and 2 members discussing how they had both had their back pain issues down to 'all in the mind'.

One of them had cervical spondylosis. OP in the spine, and compression fractures (which it seems was already documented) and yet the Dr told them to wait and see for 8 weeks as it was likely to be 'stress'. The other one is now in a wheelchair having had his physical issues effectively ignored and not investigated.
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I have often wondered at what stage in a doctor's training or career they start learning to blame almost everything on psychological causes. And do they ever hate themselves for it because they know they are just leaving patients to rot, or do they truly believe it really is in their heads. I tried and failed to get help for various health problems over a very long period of time (decades). The more I was fobbed off the more distressed I got. The distress was caused by being constantly dismissed and being left in pain, but I'm sure you can imagine how the distress was interpreted. When I did finally get operated on for some of my issues the results were not copied over into any summary GP records, so I was back to square one, being disbelieved about my own health and medical history. I finally decided to buy my GP records. I just wish I'd done it in 1998. I've finally got the proof I need to increase my chances of being taken seriously.
 
Arnie Pye said:
Yes. I got them going back about 50 years, although the detail was not really there for my childhood records.
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I see. But did the cost cover expenses as the time and work in finding the documents, printing and sending them, or just to have insight into your own documents itself?
 
@Kalliope

I should point out that many British doctors HATE the fact that patients are entitled to copies of their own records. And before they get copied and handed over the doctor or some other member of staff can remove any pages they feel like on the basis that they may harm me or a third party. So how much goes astray to hide stuff the doctor doesn't want the patient to see is anyone's guess.

I have heard of people buying their entire records only to be told they don't go back more than, say 5 years, because they were lost in a fire or a flooded basement, so I consider myself lucky to have got what I did. Before 1998 the British had no legal right to see their own medical records, nor did correspondence normally happen between doctors and patients. If someone went into hospital any results of operations or tests would be sent to the GP (General Practitioner i.e. Primary Care Physician), not the patient. The patient was not usually informed in writing about anything. They were, at best, informed verbally, and that was it.
 
Kalliope said:
I see. But did the cost cover expenses as the time and work in finding the documents, printing and sending them, or just to have insight into your own documents itself?
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Sorry, I don't really understand what you're asking. I had a thick file, but legally £50 was the most the surgery could charge. It was physically photocopied and I was given a huge wodge of paper. Nobody summarised them or anything like that. I got what was in my file, held either on paper or electronically, and that was it.
 
Thanks for elaborating. Not very different from Norway then. We also have the right to see our own records, but it is not always popular and more or less impossible to correct mistakes.

I've lived in other countries, as Greece and Italy. There it was completely different. I still have a plastic bag with a hospital print on somewhere with x-ray-photos and results from bloodwork. They were given to me, not my doctor.
 
Through out my adult live I would have pain during on the left side on certain positions, and when I was younger nobody could find anything. Now that I have been diagnosed with colitis and I get obvious flares I recOgnize the pain that has been w me all this years! Was colitis related of that I am sure!!!!
 
Arnie Pye said:
Yes. I got them going back about 50 years, although the detail was not really there for my childhood records.
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I got to see my records (rather than getting copies I spent half an hour or so making notes from them) and mine did go right back to childhood.

I discovered that at one point in my late teens, someone had fished out the wrong notes and muddled me up with my mother, (same initials and surname at that point), and noted down my mother's benzodiazepines prescription a couple of times onto my notes!

It maybe explains why a Dr was only too keen to give me Valium when I began to have a lot of diarrhoea soon after (he never sent me for tests first to check it was physical). Luckily I took one tablet and decided that there was no way I could function with them, and never took any more. Another more kindly Dr saw me after and treated me much better thankfully.
 
zzz said:
A completely different article on the same topic as this thread is now up on HuffPost under the title Painful Sex Is Often The First Sign Of A Serious Condition For Women. But Most Doctors Dismiss It. It describes the situation in the US, which is pretty much the same in this case.
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Further quotes in this post are from the article, not from zzz.
She’d visited 14 other doctors about the pain she experienced during intercourse and was being pushed toward talk therapy as a solution.

But once Streicher performed a simple physical examination, she discovered an obvious explanation for the woman’s problems: a vaginal septum, a rare condition in which a wall of flesh divides the vagina into two chambers. Every time she had tried to have sex, her partner’s penis was crashing into the septum, causing her intense pain.
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A couple of comments on this...

1) This would be termed "doctor shopping" by many doctors. It's a phrase I first read in the news about three years ago in the UK. Since then it seems to have spread and become another convenient way of dismissing patients. The diagnosis would be some form of mental illness, attention-seeking, hypochondriasis.

2) The woman saw fourteen doctors who couldn't diagnose her problem. This implies that they didn't even examine her. When did it become standard practice for so many doctors to decide that patients were just yucky and must never be physically touched or examined?

“You can’t discount a sexual concern as ‘just psychological,’ because then a woman might become upset or offended,” she said. “She doesn’t want to be told this is all in her head.”
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Maybe I'm misreading the intention behind the above quote. It came from the doctor who successfully treated the woman with the vaginal septum. But that quote from her is just weird. She sounds surprised that women might become upset or offended at being told their problem is psychological. If women never get properly examined and/or tested for physical problems before a psychological diagnosis then of course they will be upset and offended. Duh!

There are no accredited fellowships that allow doctors to specialize in sexual health for either men or women, but this hasn’t stopped a handful of doctors from crafting their own training programs and opening medical practices in academic centers. Their goal: to take women at their word about sexual symptoms, which sometimes involves approaching problems as potential medical conditions.
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Again - the attitude seems to be one of surprise that women want to be taken seriously. Why? A woman has a medical problem and wants it to be treated as a medical condition - why isn't that the standard attitude? Surely that should be at the root of all medical practice!
 
Agapanthus said:
I discovered that at one point in my late teens, someone had fished out the wrong notes and muddled me up with my mother, (same initials and surname at that point), and noted down my mother's benzodiazepines prescription a couple of times onto my notes!
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That happened to me - except it wasn't my mother I was confused with, it was someone with the same name as me and of a similar age. I acquired one of her miscarriages on my notes. Also, I had one of my internal organs removed in my teens. It had, apparently, found its way back into my body again in my early 40s. I actually know the woman I have been confused with, which is why I know the miscarriage was hers - I asked her about it. She lives just around the corner from me, and we used to work for the same company.
 
She’d visited 14 other doctors about the pain she experienced during intercourse and was being pushed toward talk therapy as a solution.

But once Streicher performed a simple physical examination, she discovered an obvious explanation for the woman’s problems: a vaginal septum, a rare condition in which a wall of flesh divides the vagina into two chambers. Every time she had tried to have sex, her partner’s penis was crashing into the septum, causing her intense pain.
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Arnie Pye said:
The woman saw fourteen doctors who couldn't diagnose her problem. This implies that they didn't even examine her. When did it become standard practice for so many doctors to decide that patients were just yucky and must never be physically touched or examined?
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A story like this boggles the mind. Fourteen doctors had missed an obvious physical abnormality, and passed it off as a psychological problem. The more stories like this I see, the more I think that there must be many, many doctors out there who have forgotten most or all of the little medicine they learned in medical school. Why do an examination, if you have no idea what you're looking for, and wouldn't recognize it if you saw it? It's so much easier to blame it on something psychological, especially if your patient is a woman, and no expertise of any kind is required to assign such blame. And you get paid either way.

Such stories have clear relevance for PWME. If such obvious physical abnormalities can be missed by so many doctors, then what hope do PWME have with the average doctor?
 
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