antiz’s Reviews > Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World > Status Update

“We are the most reliable narrators of what is happening in our bodies. The lives of unwell women depend on medicine learning to listen…when a woman tells you she is in pain, believe her the first time.”

Autoimmune diseases affect women far more than men. Recently, research is beginning to uncover why.
- Oestrogen stimulates autoimmunity
- X chromosome, of which most women have 2, influences production of autoantibodies
- oestrogen in mice triggered immune response against their own tissues, whereas testosterone acted protectively

Women’s health is only truly taken seriously in relation to pregnancy. When will our lives be valued as much as a foetus?

Male symptoms - chest pain & left arm pain
Female symptoms - nausea, fatigue, breathlessness

Women have been excluded from clinical studies and research, and as previously extensively mentioned, our symptoms have been dismissed as emotional.
Eg heart disease. Prev thought as just a male disease. Turns out women are more likely to die from it than men. Probably because our symptoms differ and were symptoms labelled hysteric.
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Despite work by the women’s health movement, “the medical establishment was still dismissing women’s pain as psychosomatic, and their symptoms as emotional.”

In a 1982 study on women and men at a hospital in New York State, it was found that women had to wait ~3yrs longer to be referred, and were often given “minor tranquillisers and antidepressants [rather] than further diagnostic tests”. Men’s pain was validated in physicians notes, whereas women’s was undermined - they were ‘complaining’ of pain rather than ‘experiencing’ it and were ‘hyperchondriacal

“Black inane were suffering and dying from chronic diseases because of medical and cultural perceptions of how they tolerated pain…Racist beliefs about differences in pain sensitivity were still very much ingrained.”

On previous note. This forced/mass sterilisation of women of colour has occurred for a very long length of time

“In the mid-1960s, one in six pregnancy-related deaths in the US was caused by unsafe abortions. Institutional sexism, which valued women’s reproductive duties over their human rights, was too often a death sentence.”