To think that women shouldn’t receive less good treatment then men in A&E…

[borntobequiet]

…after road traffic accidents, when they are less likely to be given a specific drug to stop bleeding. And neither should they be more likely to be trapped in cars due to deficiencies in design.

Newspaper links:
www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/18/injured-women-discrimination-life-saving-drugs-researchers
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/40789da4-d6cc-11ec-8585-951ab3afb4d2?shareToken=5743b6e44091870815b07a44d3997f52
BBC (about 35 min in)
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0017cgn

Original study:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35504646/

It's shocking, but I'm not shocked. Have you read the book Invisible Women? It's about this very topic, seatbelts not designed for us etc made me fume but a great book.

The author, Caroline Criado-Perez, is interviewed on the BBC World at One clip, along with Tim Nutbeam, the author of the paper, who seems wholly shocked by his findings.

I should have said lead author.

From the Times article: Professor Tim Nutbeam of University Hospitals Plymouth, a co-author, said: “These results are striking but sadly not surprising.
“It is already known that women with chest pain are less likely to receive aspirin, less likely to be resuscitated for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and less likely to be taken to hospital by an ambulance using lights and sirens."

We really need to let friends and family know about this so that they can demand better care for us in situations where we are too ill to speak up for ourselves.

What can we do to make these woeful statistics fall more in our favour? I don't even know where to start.

Women are failed every single day.

Not gone on a read it yet but does it have an explanation why?

Seems crazy, that a injured person is treated differently doesn't it. Who is making those decisions and why? Why would a doctor administer a drug because of sex rather than symptoms!!

I mean my GP certainly does discriminate by sex. Takes multiple visits (at €65 a time) for a woman to get the relevant prescription or referrals. Where as a man goes in with exact same symptoms and get totally different treatment, best suited prescription and referrals off the bat. So it's all down to him evidently thinking women are exaggeratingor moaning about nothing. But if you're in A&E and not explaining symptoms because you're so badly injured WHY is there still a discrimination!!!! Is the doctor thinking "oh internal bleeding, bet it's not as bad as she's making out"?

This is especially weird given that over 40% of paramedics are female, and I believe the current balance at Uni is for more female paramedic students than male.

I'm not surprised at all. I collapsed 4 times and was refused an emergency GP appointment and made to wait 3 weeks (it was a heart problem!), DH had sore skin on his ear and was seen within an hour. Don't get my started on maternity services.

Women have worse outcomes in healthcare because we are not listened to and are dismissed time and time again. My husband is treated like some kind of hero if he goes to the GP, with rigorous follow-ups and phone calls from the surgery. I get zero attention because I'm a woman.

Women are seen as a nuisance. Same comment applies to all female-related health issues.

how are the people carrying out these studies - which CCP among others have been having attention drawn to them for at least a decade now IIRC - still be shocked by this. HOW?
It is beyond fucking belief, tbh, and i can only assume they don't pay attention to anyone else's studies.

I think they reject the studies as "oh, that can't be true". Like a double blast of sexism.

The original study says nothing at all about medication given, to either men or women. It's a study about how frequently men or women become trapped .
Unless I have missed something, I can't see any discrimination on treatment details.

It’s baffling, isn’t it? And it’s not as though we haven’t been down this path many times before. Here’s a House of Lords report on Women’ Health Outcomes: Is there a gender gap?

lordslibrary.parliament.uk/womens-health-outcomes-is-there-a-gender-gap/

Of course, even the use of the word gender obfuscates the case. It should be a sex or sex-based gap. For example, from the report:

Also considering why there are differences in the treatment women receive, Dr Janine Austin Clayton, director of the US Office of Research on Women’s Health, has argued that “we literally know less about every aspect of female biology compared to male biology”.

Biology = sex, not gender.

Yes, I apologise, I rather conflated the issues, but I differentiated between them in the OP, and Dr Nutbeam mentioned treatments in the Times article. Given that bleeding is a big feature in road traffic accidents, and perhaps a particular danger if someone it trapped, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to link them.

Also i think we're set for future problems if they don't all start talking about sex not gender. Because painful as it might be to a trans person, male and female bodies react biologically different to some things.

So the studies really need to be clear and use the word sex in the title, not out of any wish to discriminate, but to really get to the bottom of a) why differently sexed bodies react differently and b) why they don't study women more

Can't say I've noticed a difference in treatment at my local a&e, it's shit no matter who you are. Broken arm that they can't decide if it's broken or not, but make you wait a couple of weeks to find out and then maybe need re broken because they set it wrong. Left waiting in a&e for hours on a bed, no buzzer, no one checking in, no extra painkillers, not even busy. Not sure if a foot is broken, so give paracetamol and told to go home.

What I have noticed is during visits is that the easy, non urgent cases seem to get seen first and actually dealt with. Anything slightly more difficult than a rash, they appear to go to pieces and forget their medical training.

But that is just the local hospital, had much better treatment at other hospitals. Just this one seems to be run by monkeys, I'd feel safer asking my cat what's wrong with me.

It's not all medical professionals but there is a tendency to dismiss women's health concerns as hormonal or overreaction, like we're all hysterical chancers.

When pregnant with youngest DC and suffering with hyperemesis I had a doctor tell me that sickness is part of pregnancy, despite me sitting at the appointment with a bucket in my lap after puking in the waiting room, and explaining that this was not normal sickness. The doctor told me that I basically needed to ride it out, it's just a bit of sickness, it never hurt anyone, etc. It was only when I ended up at hospital that I got medication for it, a prescription my GP refused to refill so thr hospital ended up having to take responsibility for doing so. In this time DH went to the GP for nausea related to a condition and was given medication without question because, according to the same GP, its damaging to your mental health to feel so sick all of the time.

After DC was born I had a two healthcare workers touch me without my consent while ignoring me. I was trying to feed DC and doing a decent job because it was not my first rodeo, DC was sleepy though and the HCA decided it was taking too long so grabbed my breast with one hand and the back of DCs head with the other and pushed the two together, all without asking me first, without telling me what she was about to do, and without stopping her conversation with the other HCA about her car troubles. She then held my breast and DCs head and it took me telling her to "get of me NOW" before she noticed I wasn't happy about it.

I was discharged with just paracetamol despite having had a section. For contrast, when my male sibling had their appendix out they were discharged with oramorph. I'd been written up for diclofenic but was told by ward staff I wasn't "allowed" it even though the anaesthetist was clear that it was fine. I was pressured to go home because "you've got other kids, you'll be wanting to get back before the jobs pile up?" and when I told them I was in a lot of pain it was dismissed and ignored, they just kept reminding me I'd had a baby as if being in too much pain to even get out of bed was normal.

At home I got more and more ill. No energy, no interest in anything, no appetite. Got told it was baby blues.

On day five I couldn't get warm, was in pain, and couldn't eat or drink because the thought of it repulsed me. Rsng the ward and they reminded me I'd just had a baby and had probably picked up a bug from my other DC even when I told them that no one else in the house was ill. Started vomiting and couldn't stop even when it was just brown bile I was bringing up so rang them again. Was again dismissed because I'd just had a baby and it was probably food poisoning, try calm down and get some sleep. It was only when DH rang up and spoke to someone did any action get taken, out of hours GP came to the house and then an ambulance because I had sepsis not a bug or the baby blues or food poisoning.

These are not uncommon experiences sadly and so many health complaints in women are dismissed like this. Even symptoms checkers dismiss women, for example did you know that in women having a heart attack they are more likely to feel pain in their upper back/between their shoulders than in their chest? Yet the NHS symptom checker doesn't flag that up as an urgent situation.

Your OP says:

To think that women shouldn’t receive less good treatment then men in A&E…after road traffic accidents, when they are less likely to be given a specific drug to stop bleeding.

But the article you linked to clearly states:

“Whatever of the mechanism of injury, and whatever the bleeding risk we looked at, women were statistically less likely to receive tranexamic acid than men, apart from road traffic collisions with a very high risk of bleeding,” said Nutbeam, whose research was published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

So while there clearly is a problem with the administration of TXA, this is NOT the case with road accidents like you state in your OP.

Not quite relevant to the thread but an example of misogyny in medicine.

My abusive ex came with me to a neurology appointment because I couldn't drive for medical reasons (daily migraines with visual disturbances/loss of sensation for 2 months that had required hospitalisation twice) . He got up to come into the appointment with me and, in front of the consultant, I told him he didn't need to come with me I absolutely did not want him to come with me because I didn't feel I could talk freely. He said he would like to come anyway and I told him that I would prefer to go alone. Twice. The consultant then told the ex, turning away and ignoring me completely, that he often found it was helpful to have "the husband" present to which ex heartily agreed. I told the consultant that I preferred that to be alone and he told me that he thought it was better that my husband came too, completely disregarding my wishes.

There was no question about my competency (I have a doctorate in a related subject, whereas ex was totally unqualified) or any medical reason why I might not be able to advocate for myself.

When taking the history, the consultant asked my ex to verify everything I said. He then joked to ex that he was going to prescribe a drug (with particularly unpleasant common side effects affecting memory and concentration, speech and language, vision issues, menstrual issues (menstration being one of my triggers), neurological side effects and low mood) because many of his female patients preferred it as anorexia is a side effect whereas the alternative drugs have weight gain as a side effect. Ex agreed that this was a "bonus" as I had put on weight.

I never fulfilled the prescription. I made an appointment with another (female) consultant who would actually listen to me. I also left the ex. Perhaps not unsurprisingly as stress was one of my triggers, the migraines stopped when I left.

The consultant was quite young, late 30s/early 40s and about the same age as me, so not a dinosaur, and this was less than a decade ago.

😮

Did you make a complaint (or mention this to the next consultant)?I mean I get it if you didn't - but what the feck?! That's was a horrendous experience. I hope life is in a better place for you now.

Interesting but not at all surprised due to my own experiences.

Four years it's taken to get an mri to diagnose me with MS. Four years of countless gp appointments, diagnosis of anxiety ffs, blamed on menopause so get on with it, 6 A&E visits and then to eventually lose all control of my bladder and right leg.

Dh goes in with a pain in his hand (that turned out to be carpal tunnel) gets mri, nerve conduction test etc all within 6 months.

I was always treated as being a over emotional mess by any male medical professional.