false medical information

[onlytherain]

I regularly read statements such as "1 in 4 people have silent endometriosis". When I check the numbers, they are very often wrong. It often turns out, it is not 1 in 4 people, but actually 1 in 4 women, so 1 in 8 people. This creates an issue either way, because either the numbers are factually wrong or, if they give the correct numbers for "people", common problems for women (25%) are suddenly seemingly much less common (12.5%).

Women make up 51% of the UK population. However, "Only 2% of UK medical research funding is spent on pregnancy, childbirth, and female reproductive health, despite one in three women experiencing a reproductive or gynaecological issue" (Cawthera, 2023). Medicine has a long history of discriminating against women. Until the 1990s women were excluded from studies on the efficacy of new medication, disorders in which women are overrepresented, such as FND, are often dismissed and understudied. This results in huge personal, health and economic cost to women and economic cost to society as a whole. pureunityhealth.co.uk/resources/blog/addressing-the-womens-health-gap-in-the-nhs/

What is being done about this? Is there a specific initiative focussing on this? Have you come across anything?

The NHS has been erasing women from its documents for the last few years. We are people, uterus, cervix or womb havers, we chest feed. Men, you will be pleased to note, remain their manly selves so any man concerned about prostate cancer will find clear information about it that is readily understood. Women concerned about breast cancer or endometriosis not so much. I know that many of the women on FWR regularly protest against this but, according to the NHS, we are evil bigots so our views don’t count and shouldn’t be expressed because they might make a man sad.

The NHS also knows it can't make men sad by erasing their language, so all the NHS prostate pages still use the words men and male, whereas all the NHS pregnancy or cervical cancer pages use people, and barely mention women.

Milli Hill's substack has many, many, many examples of this.

I agree OP, it’s total bullshit.

Yes. Dangerous, harmful bullshit that excludes women who don’t have a good grasp of English, who can’t read well, who don’t know the names of internal organs, who have learning difficulties or anything else that necessitates clear straightforward intelligible language. Which in fact everyone deserves.

There is so much of that out there, that we could write individual emails until our computers break. I wonder if there is any way to tackle this more strategically from the top.