"Instead of believing my reports of pain, experts told me to have a baby or see a psychiatrist"

Persons with disabilities/pain may adjust to their circumstances, and see these symptoms as their norm. A seemingly natural, and understandable behaviour. However, in communication to medical practitioners this can be problematic, as the patient may downplay symptoms:


An example of this is what @Hutan was talking about in the thread:

https://www.s4me.info/threads/physi...on-2011-newton-et-al.20784/page-2#post-348224

From @Hutan:" Fatigue Impact Scale (FIS)
"This scale is likely to have resulted in people with a wide range of fatigue severities being assessed as having the same amount of fatigue. This scale gives options from 0 ‘no problem’, to 4 ‘extreme problem’ for 40 questions. Most people with ME/CFS who are able to participate in a study are unlikely to respond to many questions with a ‘4’, as there is still some capacity. However, to receive a diagnosis of CFS, it is necessary to have a substantial reduction in capacity (50% in some criteria), and so they are unlikely to respond to many questions with ‘0’ either.

Furthermore, someone only moderately incapacitated is likely to feel the incapacity is a significant problem compared to their previous level of function and may score the incapacity the same as someone more profoundly disabled. For example, with the question ‘I have to reduce my workload or responsibilities’, someone who can now only go to work three days a week might choose 3 ‘a big problem’. Another person who has given up working entirely, but is still able to help in the care of their child might also choose ‘3’, comparing it to a period when they were completely bedbound." (my bolding)

And, an example from the Telegraph article in this thread:

"I became conditioned to think that daily pain and not leaving the house due to haemorrhaging instead of bleeding was a normal part of my life. I thought there was something wrong with me that I wasn’t able to work full-time. I finally received my diagnosis when I was struggling with infertility and my gynaecologist asked me if I happened to have painful periods. I remember my reply: “Yes, but nothing out of the ordinary, I just can’t work for most of the week I have my period.” ' (my bolding)

PwME and others may need to be alert to the possibility they might downplay their symptoms in medical consults. I am however painfully aware from experience that just being clearly factual about one's symptoms may be seen as overstating the case...
 
Instead of believing my reports of pain, experts told me to have a baby or see a psychiatrist
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One day, many years ago, I had an appointment with a gynaecologist. It was February, I think, - not long after Christmas. I had had a Christmas present from my husband of a new briefcase, and I also had bought myself a new winter coat. I worked in an office and I was looking much smarter than usual (although the doctor wasn't to know that, I'd never met him before).

After I'd been examined he told me that I shouldn't wait until I'd got a bigger telly or a second car, I should try and get pregnant as soon as possible and that it would be just the cure I needed for my pain. That was the extent of my "treatment". I discovered later that he had diagnosed me with having "primary dysmenorrhea". This is the "all in your head" version of period pain. The next few years proved that he couldn't have been more wrong. And according to my GP the gynaecologist I had seen was the best one in the area.
 
This is as old as the hills. My mother developed varicose veins when pregnant with me. Really awful ones. The doctor said, just have another baby asap and they will clear up. Well, they never did clear up and she is now into deep old age and they are still there.
 
DokaGirl said:
Having a baby, or another one. Not quite like a prescription for pills from a pharmacy...

I wonder how many types of health and social problems having a baby has been prescribed for. I can think of a few right off the bat.
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I've always thought that using babies as a commodity to reduce the load on the NHS was immoral. And knowing how my life went, in terms of health, if I'd had a baby in my late 20s, 30s or 40s I would have been completely incapable of looking after it. I did five rounds of IVF, got pregnant three times, and lost them all. I was told by a doctor at the IVF clinic that if I did get pregnant, stay pregnant, and end up giving birth that the whole process would be a lot more painful for me than it would be for ordinary women. I can imagine what would have happened. I would have been looked at with undisguised contempt, told not to make so much fuss, other women managed pregnancy and childbirth, so why couldn't I?
 
Continuing the theme...
Cleghorn’s new book, Unwell Women, enumerates a litany of ways in which women’s bodies and minds have been misunderstood and misdiagnosed through history. From the wandering womb of ancient Greece (the idea that a displaced uterus caused many of women’s illnesses) and the witch trials in medieval Europe, through the dawn of hysteria, to modern myths around menstruation, she lays bare the unbelievable and sometimes horrific treatment of women for millennia in the name of medicine.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/08/unwell-women-elinor-cleghorn-book
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Thanks @Sean, there's lots of good bits to quote in that article. e.g.

The father of modern gynecology, James Marion Sims, in the mid 1800s experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia, convinced that they felt less pain than white women. (Until its removal in 2018, his statue stood in New York City’s Central Park for over a century.) Doctors claimed that women’s suffrage would cause injury to women’s fragile bodies and diminished minds.
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Into the breach has rushed today’s booming wellness industry, which Cleghorn notes profits most off women and whose popularity is linked to the prevalence of such baffling diseases. “The industry knows that women with these health conditions are being let down by traditional mainstream medicine, so it tailors itself to being caring, listening, seeing you as an individual. A lot of language in the wellness industry seems frighteningly 19th century to me, with its conditions and syndromes.”
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From @Sean 's link in post #12 :

Doctors claimed that women’s suffrage would cause injury to women’s fragile bodies and diminished minds. Such examples cast an abhorrent pall over “first, do no harm.”
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Women have been believed to be fragile for ever. And yet there are parts of the world (Eastern Europe and the UK, for a start) where hysteroscopies are performed without anaesthaesia despite about 24% - 40% of women describing them as the most painful experience of their lives - worse than having kidney stones, worse than childbirth. There are some parts of the world (Eastern Europe) where abortions and D&Cs are performed without anaesthesia. The assumption seems to be that these are no more painful than clearing wax out of an ear with a Q-Tip/cotton bud, or clearing the nose by picking it or blowing it.

Women's pain is routinely disbelieved and left untreated for decades. We are just expected to toughen up and suck it up and be more like men who are, of course, immune to pain (sarcasm).

These “kindred women” galvanized Cleghorn to learn about other chronic, incurable diseases that affect more women than men. One such illness is endometriosis, which affects an estimated one in 10 women globally and still takes, on average, between seven and nine years to be diagnosed.
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That really is an average. Getting a diagnosis of endometriosis (finally) during hysterectomy is not uncommon. Women suffering for 25 years is not uncommon. And if you have adenomyosis - the even more evil twin of endometriosis, that is also often only found at hysterectomy. [Edit : In fact, one surgeon told me it was the only way it could be diagnosed.]
 
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