Oh dear bbc

[midgebabe]

Article on endrometriosis in the bbc

Get to the section where the black women talks about how much harder it is for black and transgender women to get treatment for this condition

Dear bbc, you may be surprised that in fact only transgender men can suffer endrometriosis. And clearly, being female, they don't actually get a look in on the article, but males , who physically cannit have this condition so can never need surgery, do

This reminds me of a story on Breonna Taylor I heard on NPR which talked about how the “Violence suffered by black women like Breonna often goes unnoticed, especially Violence against black transwomen!”

So basically “violence against women is a serious And often ignored problem, Most especially when the victims are male!”

But yes. This is especially egregious case given trans women literally cannot have this condition.

As someone who is currently begging doctors to give me something to help with my periods, I'm feeling pretty pissed off. There's a terrible mentality that we are supposed to just get on with it

I was thinking about this in terms PSE. Girls get taught about periods in school but do they get taught that they do not need to put up with painful or heavy periods? Do they get told what sort of things that help with general period pain (like paracetamol and how to take it safely, or even hot water bottles?). Do they get told it is something that is it ok to go to the doctor about? That some girls might need to double up on sanitary protection? You can become anaemic from very heavy periods? Or even, for that matter, how to best get blood out of clothes/sheets (cold water not hot)? That some people have very irregular periods and the impact of things like PCOS on cycles? I certainly wasn’t but then I can’t remember being taught anything about periods. In the end I went to the doctor but only when I had left home to go to uni but even then I remember the bottle of mefanamic acid tablets said something like ‘take the day before your period is due’ which given my cycle length varied from 14 days to 35 days was rather useless advice.

I also think changing all the language to being gender neutral and the erasure of the word woman hasn't exactly raised awareness.

@Aesopfable

As someone who is currently begging doctors to give me something to help with my periods, I'm feeling pretty pissed off. There's a terrible mentality that we are supposed to just get on with it

I was thinking about this in terms PSE. Girls get taught about periods in school but do they get taught that they do not need to put up with painful or heavy periods? Do they get told what sort of things that help with general period pain (like paracetamol and how to take it safely, or even hot water bottles?). Do they get told it is something that is it ok to go to the doctor about? That some girls might need to double up on sanitary protection? You can become anaemic from very heavy periods? Or even, for that matter, how to best get blood out of clothes/sheets (cold water not hot)? That some people have very irregular periods and the impact of things like PCOS on cycles? I certainly wasn’t but then I can’t remember being taught anything about periods. In the end I went to the doctor but only when I had left home to go to uni but even then I remember the bottle of mefanamic acid tablets said something like ‘take the day before your period is due’ which given my cycle length varied from 14 days to 35 days was rather useless advice.

School in Wales are getting period health included in PHSE, not sure from when though.

As a retired doctor, I’m rather pissed off by the PPs who assume doctors are a bunch of racist shits conspiring to deny healthcare to BAME patients!
I spent 36 years in the NHS - hundreds of my colleagues were BAME themselves. We all did our best to accommodate patients’ needs, including providing interpreters and an all female theatre team where necessary (eg strict Muslims). Even in my district general in rural Scotland, we could usually find a staff member who spoke the patient’s language, and if not we paid to get an interpreter, either in person or on a phone line.
The medical secretariat certainly didn’t sit down with GP referrals, putting all the foreign names to the bottom of the waiting list.
And any rudeness to a patient would have been rapidly escalated for disciplinary action.
There are differences in outcome for BAME patients, but they are not due to doctors’ racism. They are due to a mix of cultural, economic and genetic factors, such as the higher incidence of sickle cell trait in Africans, or susceptibility to diabetes in south Asians, the covering of skin by Muslim women leading to vitamin D deficiency, the reluctance of some immigrant men to allow their wives to see male GPs, etc.

I didn’t see any pp suggesting it was doctors who were racist - I understood pp that the suggestion is that the system may be racist but actually the differing outcomes for minority ethnicities reflect other confounding factors instead (occupation, location, immigration, education, language etc)

Language impacts on patients access to health care well before they sit in front of you.

@Aesopfable

I didn’t see any pp suggesting it was doctors who were racist - I understood pp that the suggestion is that the system may be racist but actually the differing outcomes for minority ethnicities reflect other confounding factors instead (occupation, location, immigration, education, language etc)

Language impacts on patients access to health care well before they sit in front of you.

Indeed and I was taking issue with the need to bring race in in any other way than to suggest that the data needs to be gathered with regards to endometriosis, since there clearly isn't enough currently. If there isn't enough data to make a judgement, why use an anecdote from one woman suggesting that others have it easy when they clearly don't and the fact that they clearly don't is the whole point of the article. The article says of ALL women that: 'It found an average wait for a diagnosis was eight years and that has not improved in more than a decade.' It goes on to use this quote: '"The majority of black women and transgender men I've spoken to have had poor treatment, but you speak to other women and they're like, 'Yes, I have an appointment'." Which clearly isn't remotely representative of the situation because the average wait is 8 YEARS and as I pointed out before there's a link to an article on the same page about a white woman who wasn't diagnosed for 17 years. It's a complete red herring and poor journalism.

@HecatesCats

Even with the correction I'm not entirely sure this anecdote is helpful: 'but you speak to other women and they're like, 'Yes, I have an appointment'. Clearly there are systemic barriers to women of colour and the maternity statistics are shameful, but the article is about how appalling the treatment of women with endometriosis is generally and an acknowledgement that it is poor. Underneath the article is another story about a white woman’s who waited 17 years to be diagnosed, so in the case of this condition it's clearly not that simple. It's important to hear a black woman’s experience, but would it not be better to back this up using actual statistics to make the point, I.e things are even worse for Black and Asian women because statistics show xyz, rather than an anecdote that exists without context. It's just lazy journalism.

Yes, it's absolutely lazy journalism. That quote tells anyone zero about who, if anyone, is waiting longer, it's basically irrelevant.