Work endometriosis talk

[Endorage]

I’ve NC’d because this is very outing and my work is becoming more woke by the day.

This week I have spotted a talk on endometriosis organised by the women’s network. Whoever wrote the blurb has taken stats from a legitimate website and replaced the word ‘women’ with ‘people’ rendering the stats completely invalid.

and then someone has also claimed that men also get endometriosis so this isn’t just a female issue - I’ve looked at the medical literature and it appears that this is vanishingly rare and usually as a complication or prolonged exposure to oestrogen therapies.

I am so over this, why on earth can we not just treat this as the women’s health issue that it is?! Why do we have to shoehorn gender into this? It makes it utter nonsense.

Having had endometriosis for years isn't the standard treatment tell the women she's imagining it/is having ovulation/period/UTI pains and tell it's part of life?

Or now that the menz are involved are they actually branching out a bit.

I would assume they are talking about transmen for men but you can never entirely puzzle it out.

No advice, just a eye roll of solidarity.

Who knows 🤷‍♀️but it feels like a missed opportunity to shine a light on women’s reproductive health. But the pronoun brigade are getting right in there.

Do you have a link to the info about endometriosis in men? Can TWs get this as a result of taking oestrogen?

😡
Women : it's not just in our heads. We have an actual condition that affects only women that you've failed to recognise for centuries.
Pronoun brigade ( missing the point spectacularly) : you're not that "spechul" - some of us have even rarer conditions.

Just 😡

@Crouton19 the papers I read were talking about oestrogen treatments for prostate cancer, but I assume it’s possible for TW who receive prolonged doses of oestrogen

@PatatiPatatras i am sorry that you have suffered so much with this awful condition. I’m all for raising awareness in the workplace, just want to be able to talk about women in a biological context. Gender seems irrelevant to the problem.

Thank you @Endorage There is next to no information expressly relating to TWs so I'm often searching for research on men with low T, hormone imbalances etc. It turns out hormones are quite important for general health!

How can a male get this? The endometrium is the lining of the womb. No womb, no endometrium, no endometriosis surely? Please make this make sense.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5833878/

https://www.healthline.com/health/can-men-have-endometriosis#short-answer

Oh for the love of fuck:

'“Anyone can have endometriosis,” says Heather Jeffcoat, DPT, author of ”Sex Without Pain: A Self-Treatment Guide To The Sex Life You Deserve.”
However, cisgender women and other people assigned female at birth (AFAB) are much more likely to develop endometriosis than cisgender men and other people assigned male at birth (AMAB).
For reference, endometriosis affects roughly 190 millionTrusted Source reproductive-age women and girls worldwide. There are less than 20Trusted Source documented cases of endometriosis in boys or men.
You’ll notice that the language used to share stats and other data points is pretty binary, fluctuating between the use of “male” and “female” or “men” and “women.”

Although we typically avoid language like this, specificity is key when reporting on research participants and clinical findings.

Unfortunately, the studies and surveys referenced in this article didn’t report data on, or include, participants who were transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, or genderless.'

From the first article:

'Endometriosis occurs when a tissue resembling endometrial glands and stroma grows in ectopic sites'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterine_gland

And worth noting hte second article, daft as it mostly is:

'There are less [sic] than 20 Trusted Source documented cases of endometriosis in boys or men'

20 recorded cases of men with endometriosis you say.... I'm surprised they haven't found a cure to ease their suffering yet.

Bwahhahaha.
Ahem, sorry, how childish of me, couldn’t help myself.

Ignore me, I'm bitter. 25 years of untreated endo and adeno will do that to you. Menopause has been a blessing.

I feel your pain OP, I don't want to give details as outing but am organising an event and have had a similar response from HR. I'm so angry 😡

Thanks @ArabeIIaScott that healthline article is ridiculous. Why oh why can’t we just accept that sometimes we need to focus on biology??

I had no idea that men could suffer from it so in that case they are right to include the information about men too

The more awareness of it the better surely?

@Maddy70 well that was my first thought, but when I started digging into it I found some of the same materials as @ArabeIIaScott above. The number disparity (190m women vs a handful of men) means that I think it’s unhelpful for that to be anything other than a side note. Particularly in the work context: if you are a line manager it’s a reasonable consideration for your female reports, it’s vanishingly unlikely that any male reports/colleagues would need consideration of endometriosis

I disagree. Even if there is a small chance its a health risk to all staff so should be included.

The more awareness the better (and frankly if more men are made aware the better the likelihood of it being taken seriously!)

thanks @Maddy70 - I’m trying to get my head around what I think.

there is a big difference between saying ‘endometriosis is a disease that affects up to 20% of women of reproductive age but can in very rare and specific circumstances affect men’ and endometriosis is a condition which affects men and women’ >> to my mind this is similar to breast cancer which I also think of as a women’s disease.

I think this is a bit easier to discuss without layering gender over the top, because regardless of if you’re a man or a woman the disease prevalence is dictated by biology and doesn’t care how one identifies.

And yes I’m all for men being made to confront the sheer horror that some women go through at the mercy of their bodies. When discussing stats like ‘40% of sufferers worry about losing their job’ it becomes very much a women’s career development issue, along with all of the other biases that are present in that area. I don’t think gender plays into that as much as people are very conscious of not being biased in that area, but inclusivity and equality for women is still a huge problem.

Even if there is a small chance its a health risk to all staff so should be included.

Then I wonder how much you've considered the matter. You're aware there's a substantial debate about the harms of screening. Similarly, there's active discussion of the harms of 'awareness' of zebra conditions.

20 cases across several decades is extraordinarily rare, even accounting for missed diagnoses.

It's preferable for HCPs to be aware of this as a differential rather than add this to public awareness. when there are clear risk stratification indicators. E.g., the hormone treatment, cirrhosis.

I know, I know.

HOWEVER ...

'Identifying the causative factors of endometriosis in men may shed light on the existing theories of endometriosis in women, which include retrograde transport, immunologic, induction, and coelomic metaplasia 16]. Further, this may provide evidence against the prevailing theory of retrograde transport as studied in female endometriosis. In the transport model, viable endometrial tissue is refluxed in a retrograde manner through the fallopian tubes during menstruation and grows on surrounding structures including the pelvis and peritoneum 16]. This theory would not explain the incidence of endometriosis in males who lack menstruation material. Thus, a more likely theory of induction of embryological remnants causing development of endometriosis should remain at the forefront.'

That may be something worthwhile coming out of the (vanishingly rare) incidence in males?

(Which, according to that paper has been recorded a total of 16 times.)

I wonder, if it was something that overwhelmingly affects men but also vanishingly rarely women, that would be acknowledged?

I expect when the original claim that endo effects men too the person saying this had transmen in mind.
I wonder if they'd feel a bit deflated to discover that this claim was legit and therefore the virtue signalling could have been overlooked?

😆

I find it absolutely amazing that endometriosis is about as common as Type 2 diabetes in the general population but many decades on we know f* all about it.

Some women can have it very badly but are asymptomatic until they try for a baby, others can have it mildly but suffer extreme pain.

I needed £50k of infertility treatment and two surgeries to get pregnant but my only symptom was moderately heavy and painful periods. As I wasn’t incapacitated I never sought help and am still frustrated that I had loads of other classic symptoms that were written off as normal women issues.