Women With The Exact Same Conditions As Men Get Different Treatment - recent study

[IwantToRetire]

An analysis found that men were offered more stents, painkillers, and surgery than their female counterparts with the same health problems.

Earlier this year, the government launched a renewed Women’s Health Strategy. This, they said, could help to address “outdated and misogynistic practices around pain relief” and “long-standing disparities” in care.

If a new paper is anything to go by, this is long overdue.

According to research from the University of St Andrew’s, which reviewed 38 studies, “men and women are frequently treated differently by healthcare systems”.

Their analysis found that 33 of the 38 studies, selected because they specifically compared the care of men and women in a health setting, showed significant treatment discrepancies.

This included a trend of women being offered less “active management” than men with the same conditions, including heart failure, Parkinson’s, liver failure, and kidney disease.

Article continues at https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/women-vs-men-medical-treatment-same-conditions_uk_6aabb322e4b0812a5f10876b

(This issue has come up on a number of threads, so not surprising but interesting there has been a study.)

Yep.

Genuinely the easiest way for a woman to get treatment is to say how much her condition's affecting her marriage or ability to care for an elderly relative.

I had post-natal psychosis, and the motherhood team apologised to my husband first for how their delay in treatment had affected him.

Works for anything. Just say: these migraines are affecting my ability to care for my mum. My lack of sex drive is making my husband unhappy. Sad but true.

That’s been the experience in my family. My dad went to the GP with a slight hand tremor and was immediately referred to a specialist. My mum went with far worse tremors, loss of smell, balance problems and stiff muscles - classic early Parkinson’s symptoms - and was told it was anxiety.

Dad’s was a side effect of one of his medications. Mum has Parkinson’s and it took FOUR YEARS to get her a diagnosis.

I can’t begin to express how incredibly angry we are. If mum had started medication sooner, she would have had a few more good years before this bloody disease took a proper hold.

Well, yes, Huff, but can we not call women the “female counterparts” of men though?

@Iheartmysmart So sorry to hear that, it truly is awful. My Mum never got a proper diagnosis and I will never forgive the NHS for the absolute shit show she went through with everything.

Nowadays as many women as men are doctors, and more when it comes to GPs, so why are our systems still so inherently sexist?

That's absolutely appalling. It's not as if Parkinson's is a rare disease that no one has ever heard of, or your poor mum had a set of unusual symptoms.

A friend of ours - a man - had a slight but persistent tremor and various other symptoms he couldn't quite pin down, just wasn't quite right.

GP visit, referred on, diagnosis of Parkinson's, treatment started - within a matter of months.

A frend wanted a mammogram for a lump in her breast - there is a history in her family - she was being palmed off and told to wait the 2 month wait - until her husband phoned, not sure what he said but she got an appointment that week

@EdithStourton It wasn’t even my mum’s GP who eventually diagnosed her. She was out for the day with friends and fell, cutting her head open quite badly. Her friends took her to the local A&E where she was stitched up. When she went to the GP to get the stitches out, she saw a locum who was sufficiently concerned to refer her for tests. That’s when our concerns were confirmed.

No surprise - but I'm glad they are finally demonstrating it.

Nowadays as many women as men are doctors, and more when it comes to GPs, so why are our systems still so inherently sexist?

I think many women (and I include myself, although I hate it) are hardwired through previous relationships and socialisation to tend and befriend men i.e. avoid confrontation and be super nice, super helpful as a defensive reflex.

Internalised misogyny is a thing.

I had a text book heart attack recently. DH phoned 999 and described my central crushing chest pain radiating to jaw and down left arm. He was not shouty or rude, but was very concerned and begged for help.The female call handler was rude, aggressive and was determined that I was a silly woman having a panic attack. She relayed this information loudly to everyone else in the call centre asking who wanted to deal with this man, cos she wasn't doing it and she was not going to send an ambulance. Finally a colleague took over the call and condescendingly advised that sips of water would fix the problem. There was flat refusal to send an ambulance. After 15 minutes of pleading he agreed to send a first responder. When the FR arrived she immediately radioed for an ambulance while shoving aspirin into my mouth, spraying GTN under my tongue, after which she got a drip into my arm and did an ECG, which showed classic heart attack.
I was blue lighted to A&E, straight to resus, and from there to the cath lab where I had an angiogram and a stent.
The nurse on CCU said to me that if I had been a man I would have got an ambulance straight away.
I thought I was going to die that night, simply for being female.

That is disgusting - I hope you sue.

Bloody hell. I'm so sorry.

Parkinson's is just horrible.

Bloody hell @dazedbutstillhere that is absolutely disgusting. I hope you made a complaint about that call handler, she almost cost you your life.

I found it extended to the DC. After I was dismissed by the GP as a anxious mother, I got DH to bring him in. A man with a sick child gets super special treatment we found.

Part of its stereotyping. Men get worse treatment for dementia.

As issues go this is fairly easy to fix as services have audits, and we have NICE guidelines for treatment.

So it should be picked up and addressed when NHS clinicians aren't treating the different sexes equally.

This should also be part of medical training and testing. I.e make sure there's some of the opposite to the stereotype sex on the exams they do.

I would be interested in a breakdown by sex of clinician too. I know there was a devastating report that females and children undergoing surgery had significantly worse outcomes when their surgeon was male Vs female. So men surgeons treated men more effectively and carefully then women/children. It's possible this is true in other areas of medicine. Women surgeons didn't have the same stark bias.

Have you ever tried to get anyone in the NHS hospital or surgery to record an incident.

If it was easy to fix services more women from BME communities would not still be facing worse outcomes.

I just cant believe anyone would think it is that easy.

I couldn't even get a bored junior consultant parmed off with the boring job of doing follow up calls to record the negative symptoms I was having from new medication, let alone correct the information they had recorded about existing conditions.

Ditto 6 months later and young GP doesn't think he should do anything.

This attitude towards women and not getting equal response to men is so well known.

I think the last thread about this was based on a news paper article which was about exactly as others described. Woman went to GP with symptoms and sent away with some pills. Husband went to GP a week later with similar symptoms and hospital appointment and other tests arranged.

As a PP said the two occasions I have had good treatment was with locums.

(I think in GP surgeries they add notes like "frequent flyer" assuming the patient is in the wrong not that they have failed to make a correct diagnosis. Added to the inherent sexism which is as much as anything else that women can stand more pain, distress, whatever, but even a small disturbance to a man's health must be dealt with immediately and to the full extent!)

I read the OP, and was going to comment that sadly I wasn't surprised, then read your post, and Jeez... that's awful.

From DD's experience I bet they get CT scans over X-rays for chest complaints more frequently than women too. Every man who has had similar symptoms we have met said they went straight in for a CT scan, and were offered a wheelchair! All were diagnosed within 10 hours. I would bet my house it is often a very different story for women, just from our personal anecdata of people who we have spoken to.

@dazedbutstillhere that's both terrifying and infuriating. And made worse by the fact that the way you describe it you even exhibited the classical male symptoms that are so much more easily recognized than the more typical female patterns!

Glad you got help in the end.

Part of it is that men don't get their health checked for years and years until something goes wrong - they think they are invincible, so HCP have been told to be vigilant; their records are usually out of date because they let issues fester and normalise them, until they have to admit they have a problem. However, as men like to say NAMALT! So you do also get the ones turning up to A&E with a headache who haven't tried pain relief of any kind because it is "really bad" and they are convinced it must be a brain tumor. Women are more likely to be ignored when they go and their pain minimised. If you recognise a lot of our health issues haven't even had research yet, so when go in all they can do is shrug and tell us some women just get that (endo pains prime example). After a while I bet it is less satisfying treating women because so much of our bodies and responses are inexplicable thanks to lack of research on female health so they have to make it our fault, rather than trying to fix a root cause (see B12 and anemia so often being passed off as depression).

Not the same, but sort of related.

Some while ago as a preventative measure the consultant at my local hospital said he would see which hospitals were specialising in the procedure.

I got a phone (which I suppose is less impersonal than a letter) from a specialist in the procedure, and it ended with the conclusion by him that I wouldn't be a priority as I wasn't a man working to support a family. Even though I was working to support myself.

Although on reflection maybe this his why he phoned because of course it means that there is no record of this.

Only my memory, and as we all known recollections may differ!

That sounds,,, nasty, @IwantToRetire .

Its not an uncommon condition, and sadly more often than not it is only found after an "incident". (I'm not bothering with details as I think others are in far worse situations.)

But just to bring this story to an end, years later, I got put on a waiting list at another hospital, then there was covid, then I kept on getting colds.

So then the great day arrived, I went in (day procedure) woke up, a bit groggy and thought that's good after all this time to get that of my list of I wish this would happen.

Soon consultant arrived with his group of junior doctors. Very hearty sort of person, who announced quote "they couldn't find it" so hadn't carried out the procedure.

I never got a discharge letter explaining what this actually meant or where it left me.

I mean…. A cure for erectile dysfunction was discovered before a cure for endometriosis…..