TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 22 August 2023 - 08:12 AM, said:
I've just started Unwell Women by Eleanor Cleghorn. with a focus on the experiences of women with chronic pain conditions and how much more difficult these trends make it to access diagnosis and treatment. Having finished only the preface I can tell already it's going to be a heady mixture of empowering, and at the same time making me absolutely furious.
I was just speaking with my wife about this stuff as she's been talking about perimenopause symptoms and how she has some of them at only 43, and that dove us into my comment that women go through SO MUCH MORE from a biological standpoint than men do...and that spun off into the fact that the medical industry was (and is?) dominated by men, and so you hear all kinds of stories about male physicians not believing a lot of chronic conditions women report experiencing, thinking it's all in their heads. I think stuff like Endometriosis was at one time considered a fiction (Historically, women with endometriosis symptoms were treated with leeches, straitjackets, bloodletting, chemical douches, genital mutilation, pregnancy [as a form of treatment....the fuck?], hanging upside down, surgical intervention, and even killing due to suspicion of demonic possession (the FUCK?!).
That all comes off the fact that men simply do not have the same type of bodies women have, nor the same massive set of possible traumas that can occur as a result...FFS women MAKE WHOLE ASS HUMANS inside them...but Dr. Fuckstick can't fathom that they have some chronic pain since
he can't readily identify with so it must be invented or exaggerated.
So yeah, the patriarchy is largely to blame for this stuff. We are moving the paradigm but holy shit is it slow.
FWIW the BEST doctors I've encountered in my life have been women....every single one. Their bedside manner alone is untouchable. And every male doctor has been varying shades of asshole, barring possibly my childhood paediatrician who was nice. But like my current doctor? Yeah, he's a fucking prick. If my wife doctor ever tales new patients (she's a lovely older Irish woman) I'll be in there like a shot.
"When the last tree has fallen, and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money, oh no." ~Aurora
"Someone will always try to sell you despair, just so they don't feel alone." ~Ursula Vernon