Medical gaslighting against women
I recently learned a friend of mine has been suffering from endometriosis, a condition that affects 1 in 10 women. She shared on her social media that she had to find adecuate, compassionate care all the way in London because the U.S. healthcare system has failed to treat her chronic pain condition.
She was fed up and left her home of Asheville to go to the UK where she booked her surgery with empathetic doctors and nurses— a stark contrast to her doctor in the US who ignored her story and told her the pain she was experiencing was all in her head after he didn’t find anything on her CT scan.
I was infuriated when I read her post because I identified with it and know that this is unfortunately the story of so many women in the U.S. whose stories are ignored, whose body intuition is scoffed at, and whose suffering is chalked up to being overly dramatic, stressed out, or it’s just part of ageing. I’ve also experienced first-hand that many doctors do not partake in informed consent with their female patients, especially in regards to the side effects of hormonal birth control and prenatal interventions.
I believe this stems from the patriarchal nature of Western medicine in which women are subjected to the “authority” of the man in the white coat. Western society has moved from gleaning ancient wisdom passed down from woman to woman, such as midwives, to medicalizing births in hospitals with unnecessary interventions for example. Women used to run the show when it came to birthing babies, and then in the 1900’s men took over and decided women had to give birth lying down because it was more convenient for them. Women are taught at a young age that our bodies are a mystery, and it’s better to take the doctor’s word than listen to our own intuition about what our bodies are telling us. Historically, it was the women who helped birth babies and heal wounds. They worked with their intuition to understand the underlying physical, emotional, and energetic causes of illness.
I read a bunch of comments on the social media app Threads in which a woman asked male gynecologists why they entered the field of treating women’s bodies. Only two men replied, and the rest of the comments were from women who tried to explain why they thought men want to enter the field of gynecology, or their experiences with their male gynecologists. Most of the answers were male-centered, meaning they weren’t in it to better women’s care or fight for women’s medical rights. Most entered the field mostly because of the good hours, the fact that it was dynamic because it combined preventative care and surgery, or because they felt like it was fulfilling to them.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade exemplifies this. Women nationwide are freaking out about their reproductive rights (and rightfully so!); yet, this event has made it abundantly clear that sadly, most women are not taught how their menstrual cycle works and that the fertile window is only about 5 days of a woman’s cycle, contrary to the popular belief that women can get pregnant any day of the month.
The dearth in sex education and the pitiful lack of teaching girls and young women about their anatomy and hormonal fluctuations and what’s normal and what’s not, woefully doesn’t exist. There are a few “radical” women who practice cycle charting, but they are few and far between. So when a woman feels that something is off with their menstrual cycle, skin, or lady parts, they often doubt that inner voice that’s telling them something is off balance. The “solution” is often a prescription for the Pill or some other hormonal birth control method that has serious side effects, including blood clots, microbiome imbalances, and long-lasting hormonal issues.
Overturning Roe v. Wade makes it abundantly clear that women’s health and bodies don’t matter, and the well-being of children certainly doesn’t matter in the U.S. We’re only here to work, work, work so we can consume and feed into the greedy Capitalist machine.
Oftentimes, a woman will bear it out, enduring horrendous pain, or wait until their symptoms are so bad before they go to the doctor. When they finally do make an appointment, so many women are gaslit by their own doctors, who are supposed to listen to their patients and give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s no wonder women wait so long to go to the doctor’s office when their symptoms are often scoffed at or attributed to “that’s just what being a woman is”, getting older, or “you’re being dramatic”.
Because women are more sensitive and emotional than men, and we tend to have a higher pain threshold than men (ehem, that’s why women give birth, not men), we are dismissed when we finally make it to the doctor because the pain has become so unbearable, only to be told the classic line, "it's all in your head." SO incredibly frustrating. That’s not to say that medical interventions aren’t necessary and that Western medicine doesn’t have its place. Unfortunately, crystals and incense won’t cure an ectopic pregnancy, as much as we would like them to.
Books like Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez detail the long history and medical bias against women. It is well-documented that pharmacological studies are often performed in men because they don’t have fluctuating hormones. Women are often prescribed medicine as if their bodies functioned exactly like men’s bodies in those studies, yet we know this is untrue.
What is it going to take to shift the medical paradigm to make studying women’s bodies a priority? When are doctors, including female doctors who have been indoctrinated by the patriarchal modern medical system, going to take women’s complaints seriously and advocate for them?
I’m not going to sugarcoat things. Ladies- it’s a long road ahead. This is why I’m a strong advocate for teaching women how their bodies work and how to listen to their body intuition, i.e., interoception. Women are intuitive, cyclical beings, and our bodies are inherently different from men’s.
