1y ago

Woman accused of faking symptoms of debilitating illness dies aged 33

www.independent.co.uk A woman who was accused of faking her debilitating illness has died at 33

Her condition, caused by gene mutations, was blamed baselessly on psychiatric issues

Aston sought medical help after her symptoms—which included severe migraines, abdominal pain, joint dislocations, easy bruising, iron deficiency, fainting, tachycardia, and multiple injuries—began in 2015, per the New Zealand Herald. She was referred to Auckland Hospital, where a doctor accused her of causing her own illness. Because of his accusations, Aston was placed on psychiatric watch. 

Research suggests women are often much more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. A 2009 study of patients with heart disease symptoms found 31.3 per cent of middle-aged women “received a mental health condition as the most certain diagnosis”, compared to just 15.6 per cent of their male counterparts. Additionally, a 2020 study found that as many as 75.2 per cent of patients with endometriosis—a painful disorder that affects the tissue of the uterus—had been misdiagnosed after they started experiencing endometriosis symptoms. Among those women, nearly 50 per cent were told they had a “mental health problem”.

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My best friend might be dying because she’s a fat woman. For over 15 years I’ve watched doctors tell her that her problem is that she needs to lose weight, prescribe weight loss plans, send her to eating clinics, suggest surgery as a solution to her horrific periods that last for months, massive fibroids (I’m talking 12 x 6 inch clots here ladies), fainting, breathing trouble and chest pains, constant body and joint pain, anemia. The last five years she’s barely even been able to leave the house and blacks out walking to the bathroom and it still wasn’t an issue, and all her fault for being fat.
Turns out that iron deficiency was damaging her heart. Those clots were a symptom of another problem. The pain, the breathing issues, all of it would have existed whether she was fat or thin because she has fucking cancer that has likely metastasized to her lungs. No one checked, no one considered any other options until one er doctor was horrified to see her history of iron transfusions and hadn’t checked her heart health , which led to further testing of the non-fat-lady variety.
It’s bad guys. It’s a bad cancer, rare, and has had decades to grow, because she’s a dramatic, emotional, paranoid female who’s fat.
I guarantee any fat man in the world can walk into an ER with chest pains, and they’d check his heart, not put him on a diet.
- I’m so sorry to hear this. It’s sickening.
- I have a friend who was experiencing pain in her abdomen for weeks. 3 doctors in a row just told her she was fat and sent her home. When she finally got a doctor who was willing to practice medicine, it turned out she had an active infection on the verge of sepsis and undiagnosed PCOS that had developed into tumors on her ovaries. Had she not sought a fourth opinion, she would be dead and the doctors that bullied her out of their offices to make room for patients with "real problems" would face no sanction at all.
- I guarantee any fat man in the world can walk into an ER with chest pains, and they’d check his heart, not put him on a diet.
  This is anecdotal, but my dad who is a very fat person (180 kg) has been told by a variety of doctors that his chest pains are because he is fat. He should lose the fat and the pain would disappear. No screenings done, for years. They usually just gave him some generic painkillers and told him to lose weight and sent him home.
  At some point the pain intensifies heavily and he had an heart attack. In the ER they stabilized him, blamed it on him being fat again and let him go again.
  My dad decided enough was enough, and sought out private clinics. It turns out he had a rip somewhere in his chest that created cysts - or something - I was 6 years old at the time and never really understood what it actually was - which had nothing to do with him being fat. They put him in a surgery, fixed that and he was good as new. Still fat to this day, but has pains mostly from being old.
  I think the bias against fat people is cross gender, unfortunately.
  EDIT: spelling.
  
  Bias against fat people certainly crosses genders. But we also get to be women which has a completely separate and even worse bias. We are, no matter if we are far or thin, told we are imagining health issues and being dramatic. Gender specific care receives little to no funding, research or even interest. Even the majority of the drugs we take are not actually tested in women at all. We routinely get denied pain medication even for medical procedures like iud insertion. And if you’re a black woman? Forget about it. There are literally doctors who still believe that black women don’t feel pain like other people do and therefor don’t need medication. This isn’t even a joke.
  article from 2022
  
  Absolutely agree. The situation for women is seriously bad. I really hope that it'll get better with time, though I'm honestly skeptical. Especially since Roe v Wade concluded in the worst possible way.
- Please don’t put this on the er, as you pointed out she made it for years with these symptoms. The sad truth is that unless it’s causing a true emergency cancer is a slow killer that a primary care doctor should find and manage. If an obese woman over 30 is checking into the ER she is absolutely getting her heart checked for emergencies - eg heart attack. Unless it’s causing hypoxia, fluid overload heart failure is managed out patient.
  
  Oh I’m not putting this on the ER. he’s the only one that took her seriously when she showed up there and saw her iron levels and history and freaked out. If she hadn’t gone there (because she blacked out and crashed her car at a gas station) she would still be getting diet plans.
  They checked her heart at that time.
  But PS, she’d been at the ER getting iron transfusions before this and they never checked her heart.
- Iron deficiency isn't the only thing damaging her heart. Being fat isn't helping.
  
  Thank you for your astute medical observation. Its actually quite relevant that you ignored the context and the point of that comment to say, out loud, "well actually being fat is bad". bravo.
  
  You're saying her being fat has nothing to do with her poor health? You're delusional.
  
  She has cancer
  
  As someone currently wasting away from a chronic illness my doctors haven’t been able to diagnose I feel like a dick for even pointing this out, but obesity is a risk factor for many different types of cancer so it isn’t always as simple as that sometimes. I’m so sorry for the process your friend is going through though, I hate the medical system with a flaming passion because of the demeaning experiences I’ve had with specialists. I just wanted to point that out in case anyone reading thinks obesity and cancer aren’t related at all, it’s just never that cut and dry with health problems a lot of the time so people need to be wary of certain risk factors they may have.
  Again, im so sorry for your friend and I hope you don’t think this comment came from a malicious place. I can link you some sources if you’d like but it’s been pretty well established in the literature through the years that obesity is the primary causative factor in up to 20 percent of certain types of cancers. Sending positive thoughts to you and your friend, and I’m sorry if my comment comes across in a way I didn’t intend for it to.
  Editing to say that my comment was more of a PSA and I wasn’t directing it at your friend specifically.
  Editing my comment one more time to say anyone that gets imaging done, always ALWAYS get a second opinion from a different radiologist no matter what the results say. I can’t even explain to you how incompetent snd lazy some of them are so the only way to ensure you didn’t get one that skimmed over your images in 2 minutes (like I literally had happen once, they left the log times in from when he accessed it to when he wrote his “report” and it was I shit you not it was less than 5 minutes, and it was far from simple imaging so he was just a heartless bastard).
  
  So you are saying they should have checked her heart earlier?
  
  Okay, but what is she supposed to do about that if the iron deficiency is preventing her from being active regardless? If she's not even able to be sufficiently mobile because of her health problems, then if she wants to lose weight she has to deal with the health problems first. The refusal to even check anything to rule out other possible causes aside from weight is a major issue in how doctors treat fat people. Sure, there are some things that are more difficult to detect in fat people and so losing weight may help in further diagnosis in some cases, but there are plenty of things that can be detected regardless whether the person is fat or not, and yet doctors very often refuse to do any tests and simply recommend weight loss as a blanket solution. Weight loss is not an easy process, especially for someone with health issues that impact their mobility, and it isn't a quick process either. Any issues that may have otherwise been caught early can become much bigger problems over time even if the patient manages to lose weight, and if they happen to struggle to lose that weight, for whatever reason, then that just delays discovery even more. It should be standard procedure to rule out anything else that might be causing the issue first before resorting to weight loss, and there's no real reason not to aside from prejudice (and cost in some countries but that's a different can of worms, and it's not like it's cheap to die slowly either). I'm sure that in most cases weight loss really is the solution, but it's much faster and more efficient to rule out other stuff first than it is to rule out their weight first. It takes way less time and way less effort to screen someone for cancer than it does to lose 5 pounds, let alone 50 or 100 pounds. And if the person is for whatever reason incapable of losing weight, like if they can't even get out of their house because of their health issues, then telling them they need to lose weight first before you'll look into other possibilities is essentially a refusal to treat them at all.
  
  These are the words I was looking for, thank you. How can she exercise when she can’t even walk down the driveway because she can’t breathe (because the cancer is in her fucking lungs, not because shes fat). And she did even manage to lose about 80lbs at one point but there was no change in health or symptoms and they still didn’t take her seriously.
  And how do I put this? She’s not “I’m so fat I can’t walk” fat. She was wearing 2x not 20x.
  
  This this glib comment proves exactly why no one ever gave a shit about anything except that she was fat.
  No one is saying that being fat doesn’t hurt your health. Of course it does. But it’s not the ONLY thing that can be wrong.
  Prick
  
  being fat for decades is a significant risk factor for cancer too
  
  So you think maybe they should have done some cancer screenings?

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