doctors on tv: We don’t know what’s wrong and we’ve run tests but we brought in the best doctors and we’re doing everything to figure it out.
doctors in america: I can’t figure out what’s wrong or don’t understand your condition, have you considered you’re faking it?
not just doctors in america. so very sad. took me 10 years to get a diagnosis for an auto immune disease that the doctor in the UK suggested was depression.
I’ve never been treated by a doctor outside the US so i didn’t think i should include every doctor.
As butterflyEi Says, it happens all over the western world. It takes on average 4 years for men to get the diagnoses of EDS (the condition I have). For women it takes 16 years.
that makes sense. statistically women’s pain is more likely to be brushed off than men since women are taught to hide their own pain in order to not inconvenience others.
And medics are taught that women's pain is more likely to be psychosomatic than male pain at a ratio of 10:1.
I didn’t know that. that’s awful. I wonder what kind of bullshit science they’re using to back that teaching up.
It goes a long way back. Hysteria was what it was originally called, wandering womb, somatoform disorder, it has many names, currently it is Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS) which patients think means that they don't know what is wrong with me yet, but doctors take to mean it is psychogenic. Some of it is more subtle than that though, for instance in med schools when they talk about chronic pain, they usually use women as the examples. There was a nice bit of research done in France where they compared how much pain the doctors thought the patients were in when they presented in A&E and how much the patients thought they were in pain. When the source of the pain was unknown, both male and female doctors thought that the female patient was in less pain than they said they were. But when they knew the source of the pain, the female doctors agreed with the female patients about how much pain they were in, but the males didn't. They still minimised how much pain they thought the female patients had. This didn't happen with male patients.
One of the things that seems to be happening we think is that all the doctors that are promoting MUS and similar are all publishing in the same journals and peer reviewing all their work so that researchers from outside don't get published. But there are others that are working against this, pointing out that it is unethical to not treat patients, especially those in pain.
Not in pain but CONSTANTLY dizzy with 0 answers from 5+ doctors please help me
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