News editor Lesli Marchese discusses the gender bias women face in health care.
Lesli Marchese, Campus Carrier news editor
It is no secret that we live in a male-dominated society. Men are often looked up to as higher, stronger, the “breadwinners” of the world, if you will. We see patriarchal tendencies in language, clothing and culture.
However, even amid the enormous amount of gender bias we are exposed to on a daily basis, you would think that equality should reign in areas like health care, where a human body is facing a basic need, right?
Wrong.
For years, women have been pushed aside when seeking medical attention for serious problems. There are horror stories of women who have gone to the emergency room seeking aid for severe abdominal pain, only to be turned away, or given mild painkillers for their “time of the month,” when they should have been treated for blood diseases, heart attacks or even cancer.
A study published by the National Institute for Health found that women are twice as likely to die from heart attacks as men, and there are many possibilities why. Doctors may misdiagnose the heart attack, or women may be afraid to come forth for fear of being treated as a hypochondriac. Also, textbook symptoms for a heart attack are geared towards those that prevail in men and are often not the same symptoms shown by women.
Is our society’s gender bias condemning women?
There are hundreds of stories circulating that end with that same question. Stories of women suffering pain who were denied life-saving medicine and sometimes even basic treatment, like CT scans. Some women were even told that they were making up their pain for attention.
The 2001 University of Maryland study “The Girl Who Cried Pain” shows that health care professionals are more likely to consider women’s symptoms psychosomatic, a term defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as pain that is “caused by mental or emotional problems rather than by physical illness.” The study concludes that women are “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients.’”
There is a long history of this problem, dating back to ancient Greece. “Hysteria” comes from the Greek word
“hysterika,” which means uterus. Since those times, women’s health concerns have often been attributed to “female” problems, and hysteria and hypochondria have been credited for more health problems in women than many of the diseases from which they actually suffer.
Hysteria was only removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. Less than 40 years ago, women were still being diagnosed with hysteria, a diagnosis doctors pinned on women who were too promiscuous or emotional. Hysteria took female pain and emotional stress and played it off as a “crazy disease” that made women incapable of functioning as regular members of society.
Although hysteria is no longer considered a credible diagnosis, women’s physical pain is often linked to psychiatric disorders. This way of thinking is detrimental to the way health care professionals treat women’s pain and the way society views mental health.
There are similar problems when female pain is associated with their menstrual cycles. Periods can often be very painful, and there are serious health problems associated with severe menstrual pain. These problems continue to be minimized by health care professionals, other women and sometimes the sufferers themselves, because they have been silenced by society.
Because this type of thinking pervades society, and more specifically, the health care industry, many women are often afraid to come forward with their problems. They are afraid of not only the criticism they will receive for their pain, but of a misdiagnosis that could cause more problems than solutions.
Women have fought for basic human rights for decades – to vote, to work and to be seen as equal to men. Will we see the day when women and their bodies are seen as being equally as valuable as those of men?