Do you think womens health issues arent taken as seriously as mens?

[Fartypant]

I have heard this said before, but not thought about it too deeply

Personal situation has me thinking about iron deficiency anaemia, uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts.

All treated very lightly and slowly. Iron deficiency, I can confirm, makes you feel like the living dead and takes MONTHS to correct

Women have fibroids the size of melons which make them appear 6 months pregnant and cause pain. Yet they are often 'watch and wait' treatments

Would men really be left barely functional for 6 months? Or with growths the size of football's? Or abdomens so distended that they look pregnant? Is it just because women can be pregnant, that it is considered acceptable?

I get irritated by this too.

Having suffered hormonal problems for a long time (diagnosed) there wasn't any urgency or intervention to help and support me. I have constantly had to follow it up.

Now under a great consultant - he sees women with my problem and similar being treated by GP's on a daily basis, incorrectly.

My biggest issue now is that women who are menopausal and choose HRT (most do) have to pay for HRT. It is a female stage of life that takes place, and therefore we are disadvantaged (financially) because we have to pay for such medication if we want it (i.e. similar to tampon tax). I just always wonder if menopause, periods etc were a 'male thing' how different the world would be.

I have suffered from pmt terribly since having dc. I visited my gp (male) 3 months in a row in tears about it begging for a hysterectomy. The final time I told him I was feeling suicidal. He just wanted to change my pill to a different prescription and 'see how I get on'.

Luckily my dm marched me back down there and spoke on my behalf an I was admitted to hospital that day.

If I hadn't mentioned it being linked to my periods I'm sure I would have been taken more seriously.

Colleague is being investigated for MS. Apparently one of the obvious symptoms is pain that gets worse during periods but GPs don't bother even looking for the red flags even when you have a family history. She had to go blind before they took her neck pain seriously.

Haemophilia is primarily a male condition. Women can have it but apparently only if both parents are carriers of the gene, which is obviously rare. Because it's very serious it's understandably important to deal with it properly. However I've no idea how many/what "female" chronic illnesses there are, that are comparable, & how well they are generally managed.

Migraine is much more common for women than men. There are many types of migraine & many of them are affected by hormonal fluctuations. I know my employer is fairly unhelpful with migraine awareness...

Heart attack symptoms can be quite different for men versus women. However the symptoms that we are all told to look out for, are the men's symptoms. Hence, heart attacks in women are more difficult to spot as people often don't realise what they are looking at.

We know from various studies that women's pain isn't taken nearly as seriously as men's pain, even as pain is relatively subjective, women are expected to put up with more intense pain before they're taken seriously.

As Lego says, migraine in women is often linked to hormones, but it's also often not, and yet many GPs will simply assume that even cluster and hemiplegic migraine are simply down to 'women's problems'.

Another area where women are often treated really poorly is obstetrics. I have been a birth partner now for several women and have seen some truly appalling 'care' being given to birthing mothers, which I have questioned at the time and advocated for those women. Come to think of it, I wonder if me not taking shit on behalf of friends is why those women have asked me to be with them...

And yes, the majority of drug tests/treatment trials are done on white males, because they don't have any of those pesky hormonal leaky things, or slightly different physiology to mess up their lovely clean results!

Wasn't there a report in the late forties/early fifties when the NHS started about how shocked they were that so many women had chronic illnesses and had been leading relatively normal lives, in pain, before they had been able to get treatment on the NHS? The ignoring of women's pain has been going on for centuries.

I wonder to what extent men are less prepared to take the "wait and see" approach, so when a GP suggests it they push for more active monitoring or treatment?

Fibromyalgia is one such illness. More than 7 times likely to affect women than men. But still not taken seriously enough by certain quarters of the medical establishment.

scallops, we know that women will soldier on with conditions that are eminently treatable even now, so it wouldn't surprise me at all.

There are women walking about with fissures, rectoceles, incontinence problems and all sorts which are easily sorted but that women have to be able to have time to recover from afterwards or have to push their doctor into dealing with. And yes, I do wonder how much of the fact that women don't get the medical treatments they need is because we are simply told that we should shut up and put up coupled with the soul tiredness that comes with a chronic condition that leaves women with no energy to fight the fight. On the surface, that might look as if I am blaming women for their continued health problems, and I am emphatically not, having had a chronic health problem I can tell you that advocating for your own health needs can often feel like one fight more in a day of endless fighting and who can be arsed? It often takes someone going along as an advocate to get things moving, and, if a problem is to do with 'things we just don't talk about in this country, thank you' then that can be really difficult. No one wants to admit to a friend that they piss themselves when they cough or that they have shit coming through their vaginas.

My biggest issue now is that women who are menopausal and choose HRT (most do) have to pay for HRT
I didn't know that. That is fucking ridiculous. Especially when hormones are prescribed on the NHS to treat other conditions like endometriosis, PMT and male gender dysphoria.
Maybe that's why there are so many women being prescribed anti-depressants for menopause. I assume these are available on the NHS.

HRT is just the prescription charge. It pisses me off that sequential hrt attracts the double charge (because you have two separate pill preparations in the same package) but not half as much as it would if I needed a pair of surgical stockings . The double charge is a bit random at times.

If I didn't take it I would be shelling out for other prescriptions.

It is still cheaper than the guff you can get at Holland and Barratt. Once you have paid out for your macca root, black cohash, red clover, sage tablets, menopace etc, it can really add up.

Can anyone support these suppositions with any kind of evidence?

This is women chatting, sharing experiences. Chewing the cud, so to speak. Not sure why we need to "provide evidence"?

I posted a link upthread man which summarises some of the research.
Have to lol at one thread going on about feminists insisting on linking everything being off putting and another demanding evidence. Kinda ironic

Well indeed Quentin. The irony wasn't lost on me either.

Firstly, it's a unisex website and the OP didn't just ask for women's opinions so it's not just "women chatting, sharing experiences" it's an open discussion for all

Secondly, it's hardly 'ironic' unless of course I posted the other thread. Which I didn't.

Thirdly, it's Manc not Man but that says a lot about your thought process.

But if we are just chatting, more money is spent on breast cancer research than prostrate cancer despite more males dying of the later than women of the former. So, no I don't think women's issues are taken less seriously.

So I started to see if i could find the report/comments I talked about with the early days of the NHS (which is iharder than you might think) and I came across this quite interesting report: www.sfh-tr.nhs.uk/attachments/article/41/The%20gender%20and%20access%20to%20health%20services%20study.pdf. Not directly about this thread but interesting nonetheless. To set expectations for some, I haven't read all 146 pages but I did read a handy summary at the start.

There was an interesting bit about weight and obesity and how rates of abesity are about the same between women and men but men are far more likely to be overweight (which you wouldn't think given the amount of focus on women's weight!) but this bit really caught my eye (it's talking about the difference between gender and sex): "In other words, a person’s sex is a biological fact but his or her gender is a function of the behaviours, attitudes, values and beliefs that a particular cultural group considers appropriate for males and females on the basis of that biological fact."

I think that this was written in 2008. I suspect that they wouldn't be able to write that now even though it's true.

You're deciding that based on one condition (breast cancer), by judging it based on the amount of money spent on researching it? When most of that money is raised by charity, and by women's charities at that. It's an odd way to look at it. Have you not considered what the women on this thread have been discussing? The experience as a woman of interacting with HCP?

@scallopsrgreat thanks for the link. I'm a big believer in evidence when having umportant discussions otherwise it's just personal opinion and nobody changes their outlook either side.

@AssassinatedBeauty my comment was accurate but purposely flippant. There are however other post similar to my but from a females point of view. Based on nothing but 1 disease and the linked statistic.

Ooh touchy man

I don't really think prostate cancer is relevant to the thread but if we must:
Survival rates for prostate cancer are higher (84% compared with 78% of breast cancer)
Prostate cancer affects mainly older men (Not significant until age 50+, breast cancer occurs in significant numbers after age 20) so more women live with a breast cancer diagnosis than men with a prostate cancer diagnosis.
Finally most charity fundraising is done by women. If you are so fussed about prostate cancer get of your arse and fundraise for it. Not just by growing a moustache. Set up a charity run or something big like that. Stop expecting women to do everything.

Further, Man until women got together to fundraise for better care for women and men with breast cancer there was almost no funding into it. So I would echo Quentin's point that, should you want more funding into a cancer that only affects men, you do what women had to do for a cancer that affects both men and women.

I suspect that women do find it harder to have fairly debilitating conditions dealt with as they are 'women's' conditions.

Just this week endometriosis has been in the news for similar reasons.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/endometriosis-nice-guidelines-ignoring-womens-pain-diagnosis-delay-infertility-a7932351.html

www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/06/listen-to-women-uk-doctors-issued-with-first-guidance-on-endometriosis

However for balance, DP went for tests for a debilitating range of symptoms back in May after being referred by his GP in November 2016. We got a letter today in September with the results of those tests. Turns out he has Crohns disease, it shouldn't have taken nearly a year to have something like that diagnosed. The NHS is crumbling regardless of what your sex is.

Well, a lot can be gleaned from postnatal care can't it? Sent packing after an emergency section with a box of paracetamol. Here you go lady, you deal with a newborn (and possibly other children) days (or 24 hours) after major abdominal surgery - these over the counter pain killers should be enough for you to deal with the pain. Woman up.

you'll have to cry in front of us if you want anything stronger btw

Scrowy... hope your DH is ok, and no, it shouldn't have taken so long

LittleWing... I'm so sorry. I've seen it before and I have little doubt I'll see it again.

The biggest killer of men between 20-45 is suicide. That's double that for women

It is about time men's mental health was taken seriously and if it was it would prevent deaths