Maya Dusenbery: When Doctors Dismiss Women's Pain

Lenny: When Doctors Dismiss Women's pain by Maya Dusenbery

Many conditions that disproportionately affect women — including endometriosis, fibromyalgia, vulvodynia, interstitial cystitis, and chronic fatigue syndrome — are still very poorly understood, yet receive minuscule amounts of research funding. And since medical education evolves at a snail’s pace, much of the new knowledge about women’s health that has emerged over the past few decades still hasn’t made its way into clinical practice.

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Encountering this kind of medical gaslighting when you have a degree of privilege, like I do, can feel a bit like walking through the looking glass and finding yourself in 1950. As one woman, the filmmaker Jen Brea, told me, “It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever doubted my account of the world.”