My best friend might be dying because she’s a fat woman. For over 15 years I’ve watched doctors tell her that her problem is that she needs to lose weight, prescribe weight loss plans, send her to eating clinics, suggest surgery as a solution to her horrific periods that last for months, massive fibroids (I’m talking 12 x 6 inch clots here ladies), fainting, breathing trouble and chest pains, constant body and joint pain, anemia. The last five years she’s barely even been able to leave the house and blacks out walking to the bathroom and it still wasn’t an issue, and all her fault for being fat.

Turns out that iron deficiency was damaging her heart. Those clots were a symptom of another problem. The pain, the breathing issues, all of it would have existed whether she was fat or thin because she has fucking cancer that has likely metastasized to her lungs. No one checked, no one considered any other options until one er doctor was horrified to see her history of iron transfusions and hadn’t checked her heart health , which led to further testing of the non-fat-lady variety.

It’s bad guys. It’s a bad cancer, rare, and has had decades to grow, because she’s a dramatic, emotional, paranoid female who’s fat.

I guarantee any fat man in the world can walk into an ER with chest pains, and they’d check his heart, not put him on a diet.

I'm gonna cherish the day when all these doctors that suck at diagnosing are replaced with AI. It's so stupid that you have to go to 100 doctors to find one that takes you seriously and actually gives you the right diagnosis.

When my mother was getting chemo, she was going to miss an appointment so the nurse in charge decided to give her a double dose to make up for it.

The radiation burns my mother received were described as '4th degree burns' they were so bad.

You simply cannot blindly trust medical professionals. They are just as stupid as the general public, just as ignorant, and desensitized to other people's pain. You have to fight for yourself in their arena because they aren't going to.

I had a very misogynistic allergist try to tell me my reaction to a skin prick test was all in my head. He berated me during a tolerance test telling me I was making it all up even though my back was one big welt and I was getting dizzy/confused. I had a previously documented anaphylaxis reaction of severe hypotension that almost killed me prior to seeing this asshole. If I had been in my right mind at the time I would have punched him in his smug face.

My wife has EDS inherited from her mother. Doctors recognized it in both of them, but only her mother is eligible for financial support. While my wife doesn't even get a handicap parking card. Government doctors refuse to recognize it in her.

EDS is very misunderstood because they have good and bad days, and it doesn't show externally. So when she has a good day and can walk, she goes outside. Only to be accused of faking it the next day when she can't get up because they saw her walking.

If I wasn't there for her, she'd be on the streets. Yes, this also happens in countries where health care is almost free... but not for her, she is completely abandoned by government docters while she has all the necessary reports from the hospital doctors.

When I was an EMT working on the ambulance one of my paramedic partners was this absolute sweetheart of a man. Military vet, looked like a good ole American boy, but actually read studies about how women and minorities are treated differently in healthcare and genuinely recognized and cared that it was a problem and strived to do better. One day we were working and had a paramedic student who was a young guy full of energy and confidence.

We got called out for a woman in her 20s with a cardiac issue. I don't remember if she felt like she had an irregular heart rate or if she felt like her heart was racing, but either way, by the time we arrived on scene everything was back to normal. She reported that she'd been having this problem for a few months, had seen cardiologists and the cardiologists told her something was wrong, it was not anxiety, it was cardiac related, but they couldn't catch it happening so they couldn't diagnose yet but were still in the process of trying. She had even worn a portable heart monitor and had no episodes. She was frustrated that she just couldn't catch it in the act because she just wanted to know what was going on, but she had been told if it happened again to go to the hospital for monitoring.

Our paramedic student sat down with her and began asking her all sweetly oh honey, are you sure you aren't anxious, you sure you're not stressed, how is your mental health? You know anxiety can be weird. As I was about to lose my mind my partner stepped in and took control of the call away from the student and reminded him that an actual cardiologist had already diagnosed her with not anxiety so maybe stop being an asshole.

The most satisfying part was after the call was over. My partner pulled the student aside to give him feedback on how his interaction had been less than cool. As the EMT (Aka low man on the totem) it was most definitely not my place to step in, but as a woman I couldn't help myself. I cut my partner off and launched into an absolute tirade about how hard it is to be taken seriously by medical professionals as a woman and how I personally have experienced it and how bullshit it was for him to talk down to her in any situation let alone when she'd already said a doctor told her it wasn't anxiety. I ranted him into the ground and my angel of a paramedic just sat there quietly with a smile on his face and let me go off on him.

I've been on that journey myself being a chronically ill (from a young age which doesn't help with the patronising and assumptions made, and apparently autistic, which I only found out as an adult because "autism is a boy's condition") woman.

I still, decades in, get the doubt and the "it's all in your head" and the "just emotional" and all that nonsense. I've stopped going to the doctor because it's just too distressing to try and break through that judgment and get any actual care. I won't even call an ambulance at this point (in the UK, so not to do with cost) because I've been treated so poorly on several past occasions I've had to.

And yet I'm one of the lucky ones because eventually after years of fighting I was diagnosed with the illness I have and I've not been locked up on a psych ward for it (yet, though of course I was prescribed psych meds as first second and third resort to my pain complaint).

This is one in so so many ways that the patriarchy quietly keeps us down, and it's so fucked up that when you try telling those who aren't impacted by it about it, even if they don't mean to, the easiest thing for them is to gaslight you because they've never experienced or witnessed this kind of treatment, and doctors are seen as infallible, so you must be imagining it, making it up, exaggerating - that's all easier than accepting the reality of just how fucked up and oppressive such deeply respected institutions like that of medicine actually are (not just misogyny of course, but ableism, racism, queerphobias and so on). The people in these jobs are still just people, they are socialised in the same oppressive world the rest of us are, and carry the same biases as the rest of the population (if not often worse due to disproportionate privilege in the field).

I hate that this is just going to keep happening, and in many places get worse.

One in 5,000 sounds like a hell lot more frequent than rare!

Endometriosis misdiagnosis is common because it requires surgery to even get the diagnosis, and if you don't have insurance it's $25 000

As a man, I personally don't believe male doctors should be in charge of these types of medical conditions anyway, we lack the required organs to even begin to understand where the pain comes from, so we have no frame of reference when women talk about their internal issues. I told my girlfriend 5 years ago she had symptoms of endometriosis, and the male doctor at the woman's pavilion dismissed it. The female doctor at the woman's pavilion the town over that she switched to immediately, within minutes, on the first meeting said she was experiencing symptoms of endometriosis and that it's something they will monitor and consider.

It also seems like the cysts caused by endometriosis can be treated the same as regular ovarian cysts, so they see the symptom of it dissappear and just assume they got the diagnosis right the first time.

It's honestly kind of fucked up with just how common it is that it's dismissed so easily.

I started having severe and debilitating chest pain when I was 19. I would have episodes for 10-45 mins, just in the fetal position and not understanding what the issue was. I have always been a competitive athlete and even now, as a 31 year old I am super active. I understand why they didn't assume it was my heart, but no one cared to actually look into this for me.

I was told by numerous doctors that it was my anxiety that was causing the chest pain. I even had the principal at the school where I used to teach (even after telling her I was seeing a cardiologist) assume that the chest pain was due to anxiety. It wasn't until I was 25 when I was finally diagnosed with printzmetal angina.

Thankfully it's not life threatening and I have medication to prevent it (daily) and nitroglycerin if I have an attack. It's only really severe pain more than anything else, but wow, I was starting to think it was all in my head. What kills me about all of this is that my mother was diagnosed with the same condition only a few years earlier and I would tell doctors that and they still denied that I may have been suffering from the same condition.

I have endometriosis and it took me a long time to actually seek help. I was always told to suck it up. When I did get help, the first doctor did a laparoscopy and didn't remove any of the endometriosis. She wouldn't give me an answer when I asked why she didn't take it out. I went to her a year later for a very large and debilitating ovarian cyst. She told me to take Motrin, did a very rough exam, then left. That's when I found a different doctor.

This new doctor noticed my pelvic floor dysfunction and wanted to try physical therapy to see if it helped with the pain. She wanted to know how much was muscular and how much was the endo. Physical therapy worked well and my pain was manageable for about a year. Then it came back despite me doing my therapy exercises daily. The doctor did a laparoscopy and removed an ass ton of endometriosis. Apparently some had encased my left ureter and she had to do a separate type of procedure to free it. She even printed me out before and after pics of some of my guts.

The endo pain is gone now, but I have had some more ovarian cysts. I just started a different type of birth control to see if this one stops menstruation and ovulation. My last one didn't stop ovulation, which is why I got cysts.

Anyway, being taken seriously as a woman for health issues, even by women doctors, is so hard. I got lucky and live close to one of the best endometriosis specialists in the US. If I didn't live where I do, I might not have found a doctor who takes me seriously. I have a friend who is permanently disabled because a doctor treated her endometriosis with a medication that is known to absolutely wreck people. My friend wasn't informed of the risks and trusted the doctor. It took her 4 more doctors before she was able to get her endometriosis treated properly.

It's a shame women aren't taken seriously.

Doctor-patient power dynamics deserve so much more scrutiny than they get.

It's always heartbreaking to hear of somebody who died or continued to suffer because they couldn't convince the gatekeeper of care to examine them properly.

The number of times a woman friend of mine has had ridiculous difficulties to get diagnosed with something they obviously had boggles my mind. I have a friend with EDS who spent two years getting tests and traveling all over the state to see different specialists before she got her diagnosis. It’s infuriating to see, I can only imagine what it’s like to live with.

This is maddening, the thought that if that woman were a man, they could still be alive today. Crazy

I got covid March 2020 and it was basically just a bad cough when I was positive, but like two days after my cough went away I developed some issues with feeling dizzy and weak, but sometimes those feelings were a lot stronger than other times. When it was really bad it would feel like I was about to pass out soon. The fact that my symptoms weren't visible to others and that the tests showed I should be healthy made it easy for doctors to dismiss, and it was absolutely miserable. On my better days I would feel like a crazy person and ask myself if I'd been imagining the whole thing.

I've almost entirely recovered from the long covid, but mentally I'm still messed up from that experience. I feel pretty confident that I was not a hypochondriac in February 2020, but now I freak out over every stupid thing. If I feel some sort of pain and the cause isn't outwardly visible, I go through an extensive mental dialogue over whether I'm imagining it. At one point I had a reaction to a new medicine and I waited months to tell the doctor because I couldn't tell if it was in my head, while I was freaking out a little every time I thought about it. I really believe that I didn't used to be like this.

Being treated like this can add a lot on top of already existing misery. I know doctors are people too, and they don't have to believe me, but I wish they would have had the respect to pretend that they do.

As soon as I saw the symptom list I immediately thought "This sounds like EDS". But I see Zebras because I have EDS

I can personally attest to this, from my experience, as well as stories friends have told me. It is much worse with older male doctors, also as women age this type of treatment occurs more often. Also, black women get the worst of it, as many recent studies show. Mortality rates during pregnancy are terrifying.

Invisible Women

Interview with author

Just curious, after passing can others be allowed to reveal records for others to get more information and continue resolving things by family or friends?

I don't want to be too depressing, but the article is rather carefully unspecific as to cause of death. This makes me think she took her own life. :(