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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The number of times a woman friend of mine has had ridiculous difficulties to get diagnosed with something they obviously had boggles my mind. I have a friend with EDS who spent two years getting tests and traveling all over the state to see different specialists before she got her diagnosis. It’s infuriating to see, I can only imagine what it’s like to live with.
It's a result of decades, even centuries of systematic medical misogyny. Studies were done on male subjects, research done by male scientists, and standards used by male doctors. Females were (and evidently still are) thought of as the same as men, medically. Obviously, this is incorrect, but ongoing research involving more female subjects does make me hopeful that medicine is turning over a new leaf.
Unless you have a source for that second sentence I’m going to have to call bullshit on that, I’ve read probably 100s of articles on clinical trials and the spread of patients tested is usually close to even gender wise, if not with a very slight female bias, at least in the studies I’ve read. The problem isn’t from a lack of medical knowledge of how women work, it’s from misogynistic shit stain doctors that read these articles but still treat women in such a horrible manner systemically despite the literature being out there.
Its more of a societal problem than a lack of knowledge of how women’s bodies work, but in my opinion that makes these doctors even more horrible people than if it were just a basic lack of knowledge of women’s anatomy, they choose to he terrible people despite the knowledge being easily available to them.
The FDA effectively banned "people of childbearing potential" from participating in clinical trials in 1977.
I mean I’m aware of the controversial past in regards to how women weren’t represented in trials but your own link says that they reversed that decision in the 90’s so there has been sufficient time for doctors to learn the differences in biology because the research has been built upon robustly during the last 30 years. So that makes them terrible people for not keeping up with the research was the point of my other comment.
Oh, my friend, you vastly underestimate how long it takes for, first, the clinical trials involving women to actually be conducted to a similar extent as those in men, then for medical regulators to actually make it a standard of practice, then for medical education to develop teaching methods for the standard, and for existing doctors to actually review and implement the new standards, which may not ever happen for some doctors, as you say.
Yes, they reversed the decision decades ago, but medicine moves incredibly slow when putting things into practice.
