“There is nothing wrong with you.” “It’s in your head.”
These are a few things I have heard in one of my doctor’s offices, a place where I should be a priority and which should be a free space to say whatever I need to keep me healthy. But here I was on a tan bed, being told that my pain is false; it is just a result of my period and there is nothing I can do except take a Tylenol. This is not a case isolated to me, but rather a shared experience for many women all around America.
While some may say that differing medical treatment is nonexistent, there have been numerous studies saying that a woman’s pain is often treated less seriously than a man’s pain. In an article from Harvard Health Publishing, researchers found that women wait “an average of 65 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain in the ER in the United States, while men wait only 49 minutes.” Think about all the possible causes of acute abdominal pain: appendicitis, an infection, IBS, etcetera. Some of these can be dangerous if not treated in an appropriate amount of time, thus making those 16 minutes immensely important. Not only did this article find this discrepancy within the wait time for men and women, but also researchers found that “women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and discharged in the middle of having a heart attack.” The disparity between men and women within the medical field exists, and these are only two of these cases.
This phenomenon gets exponentially worse for women of color, who tend to have even more disparities in comparison to white men. The American Bar Association finds these disparities prevalent, writing that “racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care than white people—even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable.” This differential treatment is the result of implicit bias, when you stereotype someone without trying to, something faced by all types of women. However, this has clearly weighed more significantly on women of color. This differing treatment has ultimately led to a lower life expectancy in comparison to their white counterparts.
This leads to the question: what can we do and how do we receive similar treatment?
There are two approaches to this question: fostering lasting change and changing the way women are personally treated in the medical field.
The first approach is something we all must work together to achieve. Firstly we must increase awareness, as the only way to gather support is through making people aware that there is a problem. Another way to end these disparities would be through changing the way we conduct medical studies and look at previous studies. Harvard Health Publishing stated that “80% of pain studies are conducted on male mice or human men.” If we are utilizing mostly men for pain studies then how can we expect those results to be translated to women, when biologically the two sexes are different?
But we can also help ourselves as well in two ways starting today. Firstly, we need to be advocates for ourselves in the doctor’s office. If you do not like the answer a doctor gives you, ask for another test or a referral. If overall your doctor is not listening to you, find a new one. It will not hurt your doctor’s feelings to break up with them; it is a toxic relationship that you should definitely leave. This is your health, no one else will fight for you, no one else will know the pain you are feeling but you. We are only given one body, and I plan on listening to mine and giving it the help it needs. What about you?