npr: nprfreshair:How ‘Bad Medicine’ Dismisses And Misdiagnoses Women’s Symptoms
npr: nprfreshair: How ‘Bad Medicine’ Dismisses And Misdiagnoses Women’s Symptoms When journalist Maya Dusenbery was in her 20s, she started experiencing progressive pain in her joints, which she learned was caused by rheumatoid arthritis. As she began to research her own condition, Dusenbery realized how lucky she was to have been diagnosed relatively easily. Other women with similar symptoms, she says, “experienced very long diagnostic delays and felt … that their symptoms were not taken seriously.” Dusenbery says these experiences fit into a larger pattern of gender bias in medicine. Her new book, Doing Harm, makes the case that women’s symptoms are often dismissed and misdiagnosed — in part because of what she calls the “systemic and unconscious bias that’s rooted … in what doctors, regardless of their own gender, are learning in medical schools.” “I definitely believe that the fact that medicine has been historically and continues to be mainly run by men has been a source of these problems,” she says. “The medical knowledge that we have is just skewed towards knowing more about men’s bodies and the conditions that disproportionately affect them.” Dusenbery is also the executive editor of Feministing, a website of writing by young feminists about social, cultural and political issues. Photo: PhotoAlto/Michele Constantini/Getty Images Definitely check out the full interview. -Emily -- source link