'Women have been woefully neglected': does medical science have a gender problem? Dec. 18, 2019, Nicola Slawson, The Guardian

DokaGirl said:
I am not an expert at all in this field, but it does seem to me that for hundreds of millions per year, research should come up with more answers, and better treatments. Or maybe that's too optimistic and there will never be better treatments, only very small refinements. If that's the case, why keep pouring money into this endeavour?
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As indicated in post #6, all this research is pointless because you can never get worn cartilage to grow back usefully. Money is poured in because science is run by people who want work to do to make their reputations and most of them do not understand fundamentals and have no interest in doing so. As James LeFanu pointed out in his book the Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, since about 2000 medical research has become extraordinarily unproductive. Nobody much knows why they are doing what they are doing.
 
DokaGirl said:
@Snow Leopard

Amazing the NIH funds osteoarthritis research at hundreds of million per year - I definitely do not doubt your statement. What I find surprising is that after hundreds of millions of dollars, all that is offered except for surgery, are things that provide minimal help: OTC painkillers, canes, braces, etc. How is all the money being used? It doesn't look like there's any sense of urgency. Millions have osteoarthritis. And millions of dollars have been poured into this field. If ME funding really increased, would we witness the same thing; decades of well funded research seemingly going nowhere?
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I'll clarify, it is about $261 million (2019 NIH est) for all forms of arthritis, but I'd expect at least somewhere around half that to be spent on osteoarthritis specifically. The problem of osteoarthritis is that once the damage is done, if surgery does not help, then little can be done except manage the symptoms. There is a lot of research on medication, and a lesser extent, surgery, along with prevention, pain perception, psychological management etc. Perhaps a major breakthrough will be made in the next few years.
 
Snow Leopard said:
it is about $261 million (2019 NIH est) for all forms of arthritis, but I'd expect at least somewhere around half that to be spent on osteoarthritis specifically.
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My guess would be less, may be a fifth of the total There I lots of immunological research to do on other forms of arthritis. Work on OA is mostly on obscure animal models, proteoglycan chemistry (which is mostly worked out now) and then surgical prostheses and methods. The former probably uses up $50M or so of wasted cash.

But the latter has been hugely productive, at least in the past. The logical solution to OA is to replace the biological joint with an artificial one, just as the logical solution to worn out shoes is to buy new ones. Joint surgery is one of the most dramatic success stories in medicine. Most people with artificial joints are completely unaware of the difference. Technological areas like this still tend to be making progress, although maybe less dramatic than before. Knee replacements have improved in the last 20 years.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
In the UK the majority of younger doctors are women and the overall balance is close to 50:50. If there is male bias at ground level then women are just as responsible for that as men. One of the ironies of recent times is that the first female president of the Royal College of Physicians, Carol Black, said that she thought women were not suited to medicine. A man had not said that for fifty years.
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There's nothing innate to women that makes them incapable of being sexist themselves. Sexism (and racism, and other isms) is a structural social issue, not an individual moral failing. Women are quite capable of holding regressive beliefs about women.

I found the article interesting, thanks @ladycatlover - I find Poston's conclusion in it quite convincing. People rarely set out to embed prejudices in their field of work, it's just something that aggregates over time when people don't know what to pay attention to.

My day job involves trying to get web developers to make their websites usable by people who have disabilities - more often than not, they do a woeful job of it. It's not that they actively hate people with disabilities, it's just that they often don't have any disabilities of their own (or they have knowledge of maybe one or two very specific disabilities), so it doesn't occur to them that other peoples' experiences might be different to theirs. Everyone has their blind spots, and medical research isn't so special that it would automatically be any different.
 
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feeb said:
There's nothing innate to women that makes them incapable of being sexist themselves. Sexism (and racism, and other isms) is a structural social issue, not an individual moral failing. Women are quite capable of holding regressive beliefs about women.
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That makes it sound as if when a woman is sexist (favouring men over women) it is not her fault. So presumably the same applies to men - it is not their fault. I don't really buy that and I doubt anyone else does much.

Moreover, the case of this female president of a Royal College does not fit with a 'structural social issue'. Everyone else had agreed that women were just as good at being doctors as men and out of the blue a woman who is supposed to be a role model and mentor says that women should not be going in to medicine. I find it very hard to see why she is not individually morally responsible for holding this heterodox view. It may be of note that she is the person who developed the idea that instead of sick note people should have well notes - as far as I can see making it difficult for disabled people to claim benefits.

Clearly there is nothing innate about women that makes them incapable of being sexist in an anti-woman sense but there is something innate about them that would tend to inhibit this (being a woman) unless sexism is all about doing your peer competitors down, in which case men should be anti-men (which maybe they are).

I would like to see some evidence in all this.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I would like to see some evidence in all this.
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A reasonable point, but I have a question. I hope this does not come across the wrong way.

Surely there are better ways to find out whether there is any evidence of sexism in medicine than to ask folks on an ME patient forum? Patients here may have some info (eg, I posted a link to a book) but are we really the best place to start if you want to learn about sexism? Why debate this point here?

Wouldn't an online search find more resources that you could read in order to decide whether the existing evidence is convincing or not?
 
ahimsa said:
Why debate this point here?
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Because somebody posted about it. And I am genuinely interested in the best way for PWME to advocate for the illness. I see the sexism issue as a way to go round in circles. I might be wrong about that so I am interested in debating it. Outside the context of ME advocacy the issue does not really interest me at all.

As I have said before, if PWME want to convince the medical profession of anything it may be useful to try to convince me first because I am totally persuaded that ME needs more resources, which for a medic without a financial interest in the illness is quite unusual I suspect!
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
And I am genuinely interested in the best way for PWME to advocate for the illness.
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I thought the main topic of this thread was an article on the general topic of sexism in medicine, not specifically sexism when it comes to ME patients?

That Guardian article did not mention ME/CFS. And this thread is in the forum marked "Health News and Research unrelated to ME/CFS."

Maybe I am confused?
 
(I meant to include this in my previous post)

Jonathan Edwards said:
Outside the context of ME advocacy the issue does not really interest me at all.
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Thanks for the clarification, I was thinking you wanted a general discussion of sexism in medicine and was confused why you would look for evidence for that in an ME patient forum.
 
ahimsa said:
I thought the main topic of this thread was an article on the general topic of sexism in medicine, not specifically sexism when it comes to ME patients?

That Guardian article did not mention ME/CFS. And this thread is in the forum marked "Health News and Research unrelated to ME/CFS."

Maybe I am confused?
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Perhaps you have not been on this forum or the other one before for that long but there have been lengthy discussions about sexism in medicine relating to ME. The Dusenberry book and other recent articles have come up and been debated. I think it is fair to assume that most people on the forum would think this was posted because of relevance to ME, even if it is a more general issue in itself.

Otherwise, as you yourself say, why debate this point here?
 
Sexism is structural and personal. One can take personal responsibility for harmful views while also acknowledging that it’s part of a wider issue. Saying it’s a structural issue doesn’t absolve the individual, it just shows causation.
 
Dr Carrot said:
Sexism is structural and personal. One can take personal responsibility for harmful views while also acknowledging that it’s part of a wider issue. Saying it’s a structural issue doesn’t absolve the individual, it just shows causation.
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I agree with this. In the US, when Viagra was approved, insurance companies immediately started covering it. It wasn't even debated. And yet decades after that, women can have trouble getting basic contraception through insurance, or maybe the pharmacist refuses to provide the morning-after pill, or whatever. Paying to enhance male sexual pleasure while refusing to cover women's basic reproductive needs does strike me as sexist. Women earn less and so are less likely to have decent employment-based health insurance--in the US, of course. Maybe that's not sexism in medical science, which was the start of the discussion, but it certainly is structural sexism in the provision of health care--in the US, at any rate, given how we dole things out here.

An extensive discussion of this arose after I posted a long interview with Maya Dusenberry. Maybe this is another US-UK thing, but the idea that there is not systemic sexism in this domain of life, as in others, just seems silly to me. It would be like saying there is no systemic homophobia or racism in medicine as well. Of course there is.
 
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feeb said:
There's nothing innate to women that makes them incapable of being sexist themselves. Sexism (and racism, and other isms) is a structural social issue, not an individual moral failing. Women are quite capable of holding regressive beliefs about women.
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Well if we're trading anecdotes, there are women doctors around who can be thoroughly unpleasant to male patients. Not something I've experienced for a while, but when younger I noticed that occasionally a middle-aged woman doctor (perhaps sadly let down by men in her private life, who knows?) seemed to treat me with a nastiness totally uncalled for. Once I had a painful middle ear infection so went to the hospital ENT. After waiting for hours, silently and without complaining, the woman dr came into the waiting room and gestured to a woman patient who had just arrived. The patient very kindly pointed at me and said "he's been here for ages, he must be next?" The Dr continued to invite the woman patient in, but she refused, so I went in. Once in (for a hearing test) the dr rammed an earpiece forcefully into my ear, and when I winced, slapped me on the shoulder and smirked. I have another anecdote about a dentist, who is lovely to my wife but a dragon to me. These are my only 2 anecdotes, most doctors, male and female, have been wonderful to me over the years, but just to balance the anecdotes I thought a reminder that if you're a male patient standing in the office of a man-hating female dr with your trousers down it's not much fun either.

Dr Carrot said:
Sexism is structural and personal. One can take personal responsibility for harmful views while also acknowledging that it’s part of a wider issue. Saying it’s a structural issue doesn’t absolve the individual, it just shows causation.
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My above anecdotes are personal, so prove nothing and are best just shrugged off. If the sexism is structural it does of course need addressing.

I do have reservations about ME advocacy being from a gender perspective, or from any political perspective. Many people with a (often legitimate) axe to grind about something have tried to use us in their battle, but I'd much rather we advocate from an ME perspective, that's what we all have in common, and the only thing many of us have in common. Any other approach would just end up being another divisive waste of energy we have to deal with.
 
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