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

Jonathan Edwards said:
Typical male chauvinist bias I would say. Why would the old men be better at cautionary tales than the old ladies? One man can teach six kids to fish so it does not matter if another five die off. The skills of motherhood are more one to one so grannies would be more useful. And since the women do all the real work like pounding corn for hours they are good value at any age. (Maybe I should work that up for the Bulletin of Speculative Hypothesising In Teleology.)
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I certainly never claimed that old men would be better at cautionary tales than old ladies. However, each would specialise in different cautionary tales, both types of which would be important. The old ladies could advise about not getting too close to the fire, being careful with hot water, and not losing your virtue to the first young hunter to shake a spear at you. My advice would concentrate mainly on hunting matters, where the old ladies would have no experience, such as which sleeping animals not to prod with a stick, and on a 3-day trek which spiders are safe to eat and which leaves you can wipe your bottom with.

I quite agree that old ladies are good for as long as they are able to pound corn, and would like to include that valuable contribution in my forthcoming paper. Would you consider joint authorship?
 
I think a doctor, if wrongly dismissive for whatever reason, might be more likely to take a patient seriously if there is a second person of any gender supporting what the patient says.

I can cite examples from my family where a woman accompanying the patient has made a vital difference (i.e. no one died!). One of the patients was a man. In both cases the doctor concerned was dismissing a serious health problem as psychological.
 
TiredSam said:
My advice would concentrate mainly on hunting matters, where the old ladies would have no experience, such as which sleeping animals not to prod with a stick, and on a 3-day trek which spiders are safe to eat and which leaves you can wipe your bottom with.
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Behind every great old cave man sharing his wisdom is an old cave woman rolling her eyes.. :rolleyes:
 
Skycloud said:
I think a doctor, if wrongly dismissive for whatever reason, might be more likely to take a patient seriously if there is a second person of any gender supporting what the patient says.
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I was thinking of something a bit like that. Whenever I have been seriously ill (cancer and stuff) I have benefited greatly from having my wife present scaring the pants off the doctor with difficult and pertinent questions.
 
TiredSam said:
I quite agree that old ladies are good for as long as they are able to pound corn, and would like to include that valuable contribution in my forthcoming paper. Would you consider joint authorship?
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We could do one of those papers with seventy three main authors and a subsidiary list of six hundred minor authors. We would need to make sure 55% of them were women though, to avoid flack.
 
I thought the average male lifespan is shorter because males die at a higher rate in every decade of life from the start. Partly through being bigger risk takers, presumably to show off to the girls; and partly due to having the XY set of genes, i.e. no backup copies if one set goes wrong, unlike females with the XX set.
 
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It's all a bit daft talking about such large groups of people in such generalities in my opinion. (I have many good discussions with women about 'feminism' and they tell me about the 'feminists' who tell them that they are not 'feminists' because they hold the wrong views.)

It's like believing that Teresa May would be treated the same way when presenting with the same symptoms as a female member of this forum.

Not all people in any large group have the same access to healthcare, or life opportunities, or are seen as valuable. There are big splits between groups of the same gender as well as across genders.
 
The book is out, with an article in the Huffington Post:

Medicine Has A Sexism Problem, And It’s Making Sick Women Sicker

Several years ago, after a bad bout of the flu, I woke up to find that my knuckles ached for no apparent reason. In a couple of weeks, so did my ankles and toes. Before long, my knees and elbows had joined in, and the pain kept me up at night. My consultation with Dr. Google suggested that this was not good news, and when I finally got in to see a rheumatologist, she agreed: I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease in which your immune system mistakenly attacks the lining of your own joints instead of an infectious pathogen.

It’s estimated that a whopping 50 million Americans have an autoimmune disease. Three-quarters of them are women and, like me, they often develop them in the prime of their lives. I discovered that I’d been incredibly lucky to get a diagnosis within several months. Thanks to that early treatment, my RA was quickly put in remission and I’ve been healthy for years. But according to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, patients with autoimmune diseases see an average of four doctors over four years before they receive the correct diagnosis, and nearly half report being labeled “chronic complainers” during their search.
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While the term “hysteria” has fallen by the wayside, the concept has remained alive and well. Successive labels have taken its place: Briquet’s syndrome, somatization, somatoform disorder, conversion disorder, psychosomatic, psychogenic, functional symptoms. Perhaps most common in the medical literature these days is the term “medically unexplained symptoms” ― a phrase that needn’t necessarily imply a psychogenic origin but, in practice, often does.

Patients are often told they have depression, anxiety or “stress.” Sometimes, they’re simply told nothing is wrong, and any persistent symptoms they experience are minimized, normalized or disbelieved entirely. Whatever imprecise label is offered, they usually get the message: Your symptoms are “all in your head.”
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Of course, the fact that women are more likely to have “medically unexplained symptoms” might have something to do with the fact that medicine just hasn’t devoted much scientific study to explaining them. It’s this maddenly mutually reinforcing dynamic ― the way the knowledge gap perfectly feeds into the the trust gap and vice versa ― that explains why, despite the fact that both problems have been recognized for decades, they’ve nonetheless persisted well into the 21st century.
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This becomes equally self-fulling on the collective level. As long as women’s “medically unexplained symptoms” are considered adequately explained by the “fact” ― accepted as a scientific truth for over a century now ― that women are prone to “somatizing” their emotional distress, they do not need to be medically explained by thorough scientific research. This Catch-22 has been especially clear when it comes to “medically unexplained” conditions that disproportionately affect women, including fibromyalgia, vulvodynia, interstitial cystitis, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and chemical intolerance. These conditions remain so poorly understood mostly because, assuming they must be psychogenic, medicine has put astoundingly little effort ― and few research dollars ― toward understanding them.
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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...exism-research_us_5a9e01c4e4b0a0ba4ad72a3c?v7
 
Arnie Pye said:
I might buy that. It's nearly £20 in hardcover, but only 99p in Kindle format. And you don't even need a Kindle to read Kindle format books.

Edit : I just bought the book for Kindle. And only then did I realise that it won't be delivered until 6 March 2018. :grumpy:
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I'm replying to myself - I posted my quote in December.

I just had the bill for this come through on email last night. I had completely forgotten I had bought it so long ago and decided it was an accidental purchase. But I was baffled at how I'd managed to do that. So I cancelled it. I'm not sure whether I'm pleased to have discovered how I came to buy it, or annoyed that I cancelled it, having forgotten all about it. I think I might be regretting cancelling it. *Sigh*
 
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