Womens’ experiences of their bodies ignored

[RHTawneyonabus]

www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/08/denial-of-womens-concerns-contributed-to-medical-scandals-says-inquiry

This is pretty damming as to how little weight the medical profession gives to woman’s experiences and health and the lack of research and interest into how our bodies function. Even very recently. Concerns are dismissed as woman being unreasonable or over reacting leading to massive cock-ups

We have a long way to go in this still.

this was discussed on woman's hour yesterday.
interesting and frightening.
many many 'I told you so' moments.

most shocking I think is the valporate medication. it has been known for ages that is can cause issues with unborn babies and children's development. and still it is prescribed by hpc and dispensed by pharmacists.

I’ll will look up the Women’s Hour - thanks.

I’ve had several shit things happen to be because of my biology including long term PTSD due to horrific birth experience. And then being in the only type of ICU where you were also expected to provide sole care to a tiny human whilst bed-bound. Now I’m watching my mum suffer and not be able to access treatments for her ‘old lady’ problems that no one seems to give a stuff about. We need people to take this seriously.

I think what’s worse is when I saw the headline I thought “no shit Sherlock”. This is a well known phenomenon so why is it happening? Because of the stereotypes educated people hold about women. There is a long running thread some where on mn of medical stories where women weren’t believed by the medical profession.

Five years of intensifying suffering before I could get a laparoscopy to diagnose endometriosis, only to have my GP say he wished he'd believed listened to me sooner. At least when my first pregnancy was ectopic I'd earned a little credibility, or I'd probably have died of it and my three lovely young adult (now) children would not exist.

BMJ - Government must apologise to those affected by Primodos, valproate, and mesh, says review

What I want to know is do medical schools teach about these scandals? Are they made aware of how embedded this kind of attitude towards women is. Newly trained doctors should be challenged about their own assumptions and the dangers they pose.

I’ve listened to the women’s hour segments on this scandal and what I kept thinking was - this is institutionalised sexism, pure and simple, and why aren’t we calling it out as such. Women being ignored and dismissed because they are women. If it happened to any other class of people there would be uproar.

I'm infuriated listening to Radio 4. The "expert" cant even mention WHICH sex is disadvantaged. Its a problem with "patient care" and elitism. No its fucking not. MEN don't get vaginal meshes! This is supposed to be WOMANS HOUR. I fucking hate gender warriors making woman and sexism unsayable. Its like someone talking about the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry and then saying "the police are just big meanies!" If we cant name the problem qe can't fix the problem

@seadreaming2020

I’ve listened to the women’s hour segments on this scandal and what I kept thinking was - this is institutionalised sexism, pure and simple, and why aren’t we calling it out as such. Women being ignored and dismissed because they are women. If it happened to any other class of people there would be uproar.

Women are taught to be 'grateful for what they are given' and that they 'shouldn't rock the boat'.

Daily examples pop up all over MN all the time.

That's a great question. Despite covering ethics they didn't use to teach about scandals in the 1980s, but then again they didn't teach about communication skills back then either! I will ask my still practicing GP friend who teaches medical students if scandals are covered in any meaningful way.

I was infuriated by the report on Women's Hour - the interviewer repeatedly said "the people affected" rather than "the women affected". I don't think she said "women" once.

It is WOMEN this is affecting and it is called WOMEN'S HOUR fgs.

Yes exactly.

Women. Unclean word now. Must never be used. Especially on women’s hour. Maybe they should call it something else 🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Just watched Baronness Cumberlege' speech on BBC news channel. Wow it is just so powerful, total condemnation of all concerned.
Particularly scathing about lack of follow up and monitoring.

'Innovation without testing and long term monitoring is dangerous'
Puberty blockers and GIDs are dead in the water.

Thing is this is nothing new and it shouldn't have been restricted to just those three things.
I started my periods aged 10 and was told over and over again my pain was normal...ie I was a wimp, I used to faint with the pain. Aged 18 after an emergency appendectomy I was dx with severe endometriosis which had stuck my ovaries down, covered my bowels and had a grapefruit sized cyst removed. When I came round the consultant told me I was a silly girl for not seeking help sooner. So began my introduction to the structural and systematic misogny of the NHS. The minimisation of our pain is not just restricted to 'womens issues' either its how they treat us across the board.

There is a long thread currently active where a mother is concerned about her adult daughter's treatment on the postnatal ward.

The number of, presumably female, posters coming along to say that it sounds like she's making a fuss about nothing and expecting better treatment = being entitled, being a nightmare patient, wanting a private hospital experience on the NHS ward is incredible.

How can we ever overcome the sexism within medicine when a significant proportion of other women believe that women in hospital, particularly in maternity care' deserve to be patronised, scolded and generally mistreated.

I felt really depressed reading it.

Hmm, that post needed more punctuation. Sorry for the poor communication...

www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/workshop-safe-use-medicines-during-pregnancy-breastfeeding

interesting workshop wrt safe use of medicines during pregnancy and breastfeeding announced today.

'Innovation without testing and long term monitoring is dangerous'

Spot on. Also known as post-dissemination field testing without report gathering. This should have been halted long ago but the authorisation of devices is a mess.

@isabellerossignol

There is a long thread currently active where a mother is concerned about her adult daughter's treatment on the postnatal ward.

The number of, presumably female, posters coming along to say that it sounds like she's making a fuss about nothing and expecting better treatment = being entitled, being a nightmare patient, wanting a private hospital experience on the NHS ward is incredible.

How can we ever overcome the sexism within medicine when a significant proportion of other women believe that women in hospital, particularly in maternity care' deserve to be patronised, scolded and generally mistreated.

I felt really depressed reading it.

I think this is a really important part of it. There’s a really interesting trajectory I think from the initial trauma of a difficult birth* / the postnatal ward, through some sort of recovery (the kind of recovery where you’re also up all night trying to learn how to breastfeed, wondering what your life has become and who you even are any more, etc), through to becoming really quite hardened by it and resentful when other people suggest they expect better.

It’s a bit of a ‘don’t get ideas above your station’ attitude. Probably rooted in defensiveness and unhealed injustices.

At the same time I think it’s important that we don’t hold women who have reached this perspective culpable for the sexist failings of the medical profession...

Separately, I think part of the issue too is the coyness surrounding most medical ‘women’s issues’. We really, really need to find ways of talking about these things openly without treating the exposure as a loss of dignity. I definitely could play my part in that more fully - I don’t mention my birth injury enough, especially not to people who haven’t also given birth. I think sometimes we keep these conversations too private and then we have these headlines where those of us ‘in the know’ are completely unsurprised yet other people had no idea there was an issue. I feel that I don’t want to scare people, especially women who may yet give birth, but equally - my problem wasn’t my (lovely, actually) birth, it was that the colorectal doctors didn’t sufficiently recognise that my injury stemmed from a fast birth and extensive suturing, rather than from constipation, even though I kept fucking telling them. And maybe if more people like me talked more about that, it wouldn’t have seemed such an outlandish idea.

• I think ‘difficult birth’ doesn’t even necessarily mean ‘something went wrong’ or instruments or EMCS or lasting damage or whatever. I think it’s more qualitative than that, and is probably to do with how dis/empowered the birthing woman was, how they were supported through/after their experience.

Re: talking about it, I’m also always reminded of that storyline on Call the midwife, with the woman who just accepted urine incontinence as the universal lot of a middle-aged woman who’d given birth. I don’t think that idea has gone away. Some of that is about being taught to shut up and be grateful, some of it is about a culture where we wouldn’t dare discuss pee. And I don’t think we’ve moved far (enough) on either of those since the 1950s.

this is huge. It's not only "women's" problems for which we are fobbed off, but also health issues which affect both sexes but present in non-text book fashion in women. Cardiac symptoms and autism being two examples.

I just remember the awful gaslight-y behaviour following the birth of my first baby...

@bluefoxmug

most shocking I think is the valporate medication. it has been known for ages that is can cause issues with unborn babies and children's development. and still it is prescribed by hpc and dispensed by pharmacists.

I discussed this last night with my husband who is a pharmacist and has been for 25 years. He has not seen it prescribed for some time for women of childbearing age (14-50 years), he's worked in quite a few different locations. When the guidelines changed they had to personally contact every female patient aged 14-50 who they had dispensed Sodium Valproate to and discuss the issue and send them to their GPs for a medication change. If a GP tries to prescribe it now, a warning notice will come up. If it is still being prescribed and dispensed there's a far bigger issue.

It’s not surprising but there’s a secondary element here to the sexism. I’ve found that the complete lack of interest shown by medical professionals in the UK is partly driven by the bizarre culture of undeserving patients promoted within the NHS and British society more widely. My experiences abroad and in the private sector were very very different.

One of my first reactions on seeing this Guardian piece about the (rare) neurological sequelae of C19 was to wonder which healthcare system this was spotted in - given the common experience of women having their symptoms or reports of 'odd behaviour' dismissed as "just women'. (NB, it is the UK where this was spotted. I have to wonder just how many people, but women in particular, are not being diagnosed.)

One coronavirus patient described in the paper, a 55-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric illness, began to behave oddly the day after she was discharged from hospital.

She repeatedly put her coat on and took it off again and began to hallucinate, reporting that she saw monkeys and lions in her house. She was readmitted to hospital and gradually improved on antipsychotic medication.

Another woman, aged 47, was admitted to hospital with a headache and numbness in her right hand a week after a cough and fever came on. She later became drowsy and unresponsive and required an emergency operation to remove part of her skull to relieve pressure on her swollen brain.

“We want clinicians around the world to be alert to these complications of coronavirus,” Zandi said. He urged physicians, GPs and healthcare workers with patients with cognitive symptoms, memory problems, fatigue, numbness, or weakness, to discuss the case with neurologists.

“The message is not to put that all down to the recovery, and the psychological aspects of recovery,” he said. “The brain does appear to be involved in this illness.”

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/warning-of-serious-brain-disorders-in-people-with-mild-covid-symptoms