How do we get girls/women to be taken more seriously by doctors?

[BeGoneHayfever]

Martha’s Rule saving lives as families use right to second opinion

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e5bf9ff0-fd61-42a6-bcda-75ca70962ef2?shareToken=0fe7b6e795af3dcaa1991e671abb7782

i was reading this article about Martha’s rule and how it is working and I noticed the 3 tragic deaths quoted here were all girls or young women, one teen being dismissed as a ‘dramatic teenager’ before she died in agony. Reason this prompted my mind is both dp and I have a similar health condition and get vastly different treatment from the NHS. The red carpet is practically rolled out for Dp yet a lot of my symptoms were (wrongly) blamed on the menopause! My step daughter has also started with extremely painful periods to be told by the doctor it’s ’part of being a woman’ without any medication or investigation offered.

Do we need to try and ensure when doctors are trained that they are aware of a bias? How else can we tackle this?

Whilst I agree that women are treated differently to men in healthcare. The examples in the article have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with how hard sepsis is to treat. So they have nothing to do with bias. If it was an examples of say three women that all died of missed cervical cancer or stomach cancer then I would agree with you. But in the case of the article like I said it’s treating sepsis that is the issue. Doctors are taught the basics in first year about bias so they aren’t the issue, it is society in general that don’t take women seriously. Look at how cervical screenings have now been reduced from 3 years to fives years, this decision wasn’t made by doctors it was made by the government. No idea what we can do other than just advocate for ourselves as it’s proven that the people making the decisions don’t care.

I think you rather miss the point that women’s pain and distress are being hysteria or a sign that they are over-dramatic, whereas men’s pain is taken seriously.

As PP has said, the point made by the OP was about women’s pain being dismissed whereas men’s pain is treated seriously. It may have been coincidence that the three cases in the article were all female, and sepsis definitely is hard to spot in the early stages, but the point remains. I’m not sure I’d want to rely solely on doctors being told in their first year about the risk of bias as the only protection against the centuries-long bias that runs through all medicinal research and knowledge (based on the default male).

Also, I disagree that it is necessarily wrong for decisions on screening programmes to be taken by governments rather than doctors. Doctors are trained to treat the individual based on individual symptoms, but screening decisions are taken at the population level based on statistical analyses of the impact on health outcomes of intervention. Those decisions have to be taken at a macro level, and governments (which, in the Uk at least, have doctors working within them as advisers) are well placed to take those decisions.

I’m not missing the point I said I agree with op hence my comments about cervical screenings and the government . But the examples in the article are about children and a young woman dying of sepsis, which is very hard to treat. I think you’re missing the point that the article is not relevant. If you’re wanting to prove a point there are plenty of articles already out there about women not being taking seriously, they would have been more relevant.

As a mother I feel this keenly. My dc's concerns have been brushed aside so many times by paediatric consultants who do a head tilt and say "and are you always this anxious about your dc's health?" No, I am not unduly anxious, I am trying to sort out why my dc can't breathe! A lovely old female gp eventually told me to take DH and let him do all the talking in the appointment and suddenly DC booked in for an op within 2 weeks. He literally read off a piece of paper I had given him!

It's also class though because whenever I've had to go into hospital for me, they treat me like crap until I mention I have a doctorate too. Not in any stem subject or anything relevant to my condition but suddenly I get clear explanations rather than talking over my head and they genuinely start consulting me, talk me through scans etc.

I don’t agree @OneCosyCrow. I very much doubt the doctor would have called a boy a ‘dramatic teenager’ . Her pain was dismissed or disregarded because she was female and she was left to die in agony.

I don’t know what the answer is.

@Optimustimethat’s horrendous! I was also told by a GP that if I wanted dc’s health conditions taken seriously we should turn up as a family (ie being along dh!). When dd had her first hernia operation, I had already split up from dh and the surgeon said ‘I don’t usually allow mothers in with their dc for the anaesthetic because they tend to get hysterical - I usually ask for the father - but I guess we’ll have to do with you today so I’m just warning you, don’t get hysterical’. I’m about the least hysterical woman alive!

I’m not disagreeing with you about how women’s health isn’t taking seriously. My point is sepsis is hard to treat. Example below is just one case about a boy dying from sepsis. There are many more cases like this involving boys and men.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3v7712r95o.amp

You should have made a complaint about that surgeon that’s disgusting misogyny.

That is appalling.

Yes, sepsis is hard to diagnose. The point in these examples is that the particular young woman was accused of being an over-dramatic teenager, which seems to be an insult particularly levelled at women and girls.

I’m a woman, I completely understand the point. But like I said sepsis is very difficult to treat regardless of your sex.

Link below is another example of man dying from sepsis due to not being taking seriously.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde9dr9dkdzo.amp

You only have look at how women are treated post caesarean v men getting routine operations.

Well yes exactly. I think I was thrown a couple of paracetamol every now and then after my c-section whereas ex-DH was given as much pain relief as he needed after a hernia repair. Fortunately I wasn’t in too much pain and my mum bought me in my own stash of drugs but there was a huge difference in the way we were treated.

In another example, my parents both went to their GP with very similar symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. My dad was immediately referred to hospital for further tests, my mum was told it was anxiety and stress. Dad’s test results came back clear however it took four years for my mum to be taken seriously and finally get her Parkinson’s diagnosis. If she had been started on medication sooner her quality of life would be far better than it is now.

Misogyny is so deeply rooted in the NHS that I doubt women and girls will ever have a level playing field when it comes to medical care.

Just adding another voice saying DH now does nearly all the medical appointments for our children as the service he gets far exceeds the service i get for them. Again he literally reads from my notes sometimes.

One GP said 'we know things are bad if the father takes time off work'.

obviously my work doesn't exist or just doesn't care if I'm off, so i can just be at the doctors for a fun outing.

The appalling state of maternity care with no improvement for decades is testament to the NHS's contempt for women. Although there are numerous reasons for this, this inbuilt disregard comes from the very top. I can't help noticing that as soon as men starting demanding to use the NHS for their own ends, including to access women on single sex wards, the NHS spent millions complying, eradicating the language of women (even in maternity), rainbow initiatives, flags and endless hours of dodgy training sessions. Still continuing today.

Yet improving maternity care to stop the women and babies being harmed just isn't top of the agenda for NHS leaders. And at the moment, they don't care about women and girls enough to be bothered. Evidenced by all the anti Supreme Court judgment they put out.

I completely agree with this. My FIL had an operation recently and was sent home with morphine. When I had my Caesarian I was told to take paracetamol.

In terms of dismissing women and girls pain, I went to the hospital some years back with awful abdominal pain. I was sent home and told it was just period pains. It actually turned out to be an ectopic. My friend had taken me back to A&E. They tried to send me home again but it ruptured whilst I was there. If they had taken me seriously the first time it could have been treated with medication, but because they dismissed me I had to have major abdominal surgery and I lost an ovary and fallopian tube.