Book due out: "Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery"

[Cheshire]

Another article:
'Medical Symptoms That Medicine Can't Hear': A Conversation With Maya Dusenbery

One woman even said she was thankful for ultimately receiving a cancer diagnosis because she felt validated that her symptoms weren't made up, that she wasn't "crazy."

This is the real core problem. It has become entrenched in medicine. I write about the knowledge gap and the trust gap being mutually reinforcing, and this is an example of how that happens and how the one sees the other. If medicine has collectively decided that any symptoms in women can't be explained by an underlying physical disease or aren't yet understood in precise biological terms, then we attribute them to psychogenic causes and just don't do the scientific research that's needed to explain the symptoms. It's a surprising problem for medicine to have, given that medicine presents itself as a scientific endeavor. If it's medically unexplained, then we should be doing the research to explain it. That's the whole point. Instead of pouring all of the research money and effort into explaining [women's symptoms], the opposite has happened—they have been totally neglected.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/medical-symptoms-that-medicine-cant-hear

 

[Guest 102]

I don't think Dusenbery is making any accusations relating to why some diseases disproportionately affect women. But given that some diseases do, for whatever reason, I think she is saying that some of those conditions are not given due attention by the medical profession.

It feels to me like you are taking that too personally. From everything I read on S4ME, PR, etc, there seems to be a strong consensus that genuine gender bias exists within the medical establishment for those with ME, so maybe for other conditions also. I would be strongly opposed to any suggestion that all medical professionals are tarred with the same brush. I think everyone here in S4ME will have the greatest respect for your endeavours, and would not be agreeing with someone that suggested otherwise.

She clearly got that wrong.

That is a blanket comment I find disturbing. I have little time for hard-core feminism, the same as I have little time for hard-core anything else, but I don't know if Dusenbery's book is hard-core feminism for feminism's sake, or simply feminism in search of truth, which I do have time for.

But I've only read the amazon blurb, not the book.

I am not sure at all that the gender bias applies v much to the neglect of ME research, it is a far more complex narrative, and I think it distracts from the complexity of that narrative to focus on more women than men having ME. But I find the term 'feminists whingeing' to be quite disturbing too, Barry, I agree with you (sorry, this post published before I had finished so it was full of typos a few mins ago).

 

[Arnie Pye]

Another article:
'Medical Symptoms That Medicine Can't Hear': A Conversation With Maya Dusenbery


https://psmag.com/social-justice/medical-symptoms-that-medicine-cant-hear

A link from the above article took me to this :

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-10-29/entertainment/8603210488_1_male-body-male-model-moral

Female Trouble
Imagine A Study About Uterine Cancer -- That Only Examines Men.
October 29, 1986|By Trisha Flynn, The Rocky Mountain News.
For centuries experts have studied groups of males and applied the results to all of us. The trouble is, all of us aren`t male--more than half of us are female.

One of the most outrageous examples is going on right now at Rockefeller University in New York.

Researchers there are studying the effects of obesity on estrogen activity and the tendency for women to develop breast and uterine cancer. All the subjects being studied are male.

Even though heart disease is the No. 1 killer of both women and men, most heart research is still done on men. The male body is still the norm.

So is the male mind. Until recently, psychological studies were designed by males, for males, and the results--regardless of the sex of the subject

--were then compared to the male model.

By far the most controversial of these studies was the one used to determine moral development in children. The National Institutes of Health helped fund the 11-year project, which used only males for its model of morality. The conclusion: Little girls are morally inferior to little boys.

The entire article is very short. Sadly it doesn't have any references, so I couldn't find out why little girls were deemed to be morally inferior to little boys. I wonder if the unnamed authors of this unnamed study stopped to wonder why the prison population is overwhelmingly male if males are intrinsically more moral than females?

 

[Inara]

I like what Maya Dusenbery writes.

I often had the thought that psychiatry is sexistic. Of course, many men suffer (and have suffered) due to psychiatry, too. But when I came across stories from the past - where e.g. some husbands were fed up with their wives and decided to dispose themselves of them, psychiatry was very helpful in doing so - I realized psychiatry is one expression of patriarchalism; of course, it displays discrimination and degradation in general, but my impression is that up until today women were more affected.

I have to make that experience again and again when it comes to doctors; not only when it is about ME. And I hear stories by women who make comparable experiences. In the meanwhile, it makes me pretty angry, to say it nicely. And I ask myself: WHY??? And what to do?

I often wonder what kinds of discrimination develop in matriarchalisms...Does anyone know? (Hereby I assume that discrimination will always exist whenever human beings are involved.)

 

[Inara]

Researchers there are studying the effects of obesity on estrogen activity and the tendency for women to develop breast and uterine cancer. All the subjects being studied are male.

Come on, this has to be a joke.

 

[Arnie Pye]

Come on, this has to be a joke.

Notice that the link I gave was written in 1986. It isn't very recent. But I believe it wasn't until the 1990s that the powers-that-be said researchers must start including women in their experimental groups.

At the time I posted I tried finding the research that was being referred to but couldn't find anything.

 

[Inara]

so I couldn't find out why little girls were deemed to be morally inferior to little boys

Maybe because they are girls, and as you know, it was the woman that brought sin into the world and who reproduces it (due to e.g. Augustinus). Nowadays there even still exist people who think that euthanasia is a good thing, so why not believe in the inferiority of the female, too - or in any inferiority of anyone?

Maybe this inferiority is the reason why women get certain diseases more often, like ME? You know, people with ME have a certain personality structure... (Irony here...) And probably, men who get ME, too, are just as inferior as a woman.

(Ehm, if this breaches any rule, please feel free to remove it.)

 

[Inara]

Notice that the link I gave was written in 1986.

Still...that this should really have happened..? You want to know more about breast and uterine cancer and only look at men? It's really hard for me to believe such a thing really happened.

At the time I posted I tried finding the research that was being referred to but couldn't find anything

Hm.

 

[Arnie Pye]

Still...that this should really have happened..? You want to know more about breast and uterine cancer and only look at men? It's really hard for me to believe such a thing really happened.

There are lots of links on the subject online - these are just the first two that I found :

Title : Gender bias in research: how does it affect evidence based medicine?

Link : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1761670/#!po=2.27273

Title : Most scientific studies only use male subjects. Here's why that's a terrible idea.

Link : https://www.popsci.com/male-female-research-subjects

 

[Inara]

At the time I posted I tried finding the research that was being referred to but couldn't find anything.

I went through Leon Bradlow's publication list and looked at his 80s publications - there wasn't a study where it was mentioned the cohort consisted only of men (where it was about breast cancer, estrogen, uterine cancer). But to be fair, most papers are behind paywalls, and many abstracts didn't contain much information about the cohort (if, it was referenced to females); so this is not final.

Thanks for the links!