User:An739/sandbox

Female patients[edit]

Women have been described in studies and in narratives as hysterical and neurotic, and many feel that physicians take their pain less seriously. Historically, women's health was only associated with reproductive health, and thus has often been called "bikini medicine" because the field largely focused on the anatomy covered by a bathing suit. Until recently, clinical research mainly used male subjects, male cells, and male mice, and many women were excluded from research because they were considered too weak, too variable, and in need of protection from the harms associated with medical research studies. Results from these all-male studies, including studies important in understanding how certain drugs behave in the body, were applied to female patients as well, despite biological differences in the way disease presents in females and males and that women women are more likely to have adverse reactions to medication. Modern research on human subjects are made up of approximately an equal distribution of female and male subjects, but female subjects in research are largely still underrepresented in specific ares of medical research, like cardiovascular research and drug studies. Narrative from physicians include reporting that women's complaints are considered exaggerated and may be assumed to be invalid. Women have been historically considered less stable than men, and their physical ailments are often considered by physicians to be a result of emotions. Women's symptoms are often not taken seriously, and women experience high rates of misdiagnosis, unrecognized symptoms, or are assumed to be experiencing a psychosomatic disorder. There has also been a reported difference between treatment of physically attractive patients versus physically unattractive patients, a bias that exists in both male and female patients, but is more pronounced in female patients. Female patients who are considered conventionally attractive are thought to be experiencing less pain than unattractive female patients. Female patients have also been considered more demanding patients, and are considered to be a greater burden than male patients. One observer has stated that, "different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence." In the medical community, women are perceived as having to "prove they are as sick as male patients," what the medical community has deemed "Yentyl Syndrome." There are those that disagree with this characterization, stating that chronic pain specifically is hard to treat in all people, and that there is a greater bias against young people than against genders.

Generally, women are treated less aggressively than men for pain, and over 90% of women with chronic pain believe that they are treated differently by healthcare professionals because of their gender. Women are often referred to psychiatrists for treatment, and are more likely to be prescribed sedatives than pain medicine. This can cause complications if a psychiatric condition is diagnosed, often incorrectly, and can be especially detrimental if drugs are prescribed because antidepressants and psychiatric drugs "are absorbed differently in women and vary in effectiveness" and can have unwanted side effects. Research has indicated that women metabolize drugs differently than men. However, drug dosage is rarely broken down by sex, and this can lead to highly detrimental effects.

A specific example of how misdiagnosis effects women is the care of female heart-attacks. Women who are experiencing a heart attack are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and released from the hospital during the heart attack. This is often due to the fact that women generally experience different heart-attack symptoms than men, including flu-like symptoms.

Specifically, black women and women of color are at an even greater disadvantage. Black women are twice as likely to have strokes, and their chances for survival are even lower than white women. Black women also face greater challenges when it comes to breast cancer, and are more likely to be misdiagnosed and more likely to die. In her book, The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde speaks about her unpleasant experiences as a black female breast cancer patient, her troubling experiences with physicians and caretakers, and her struggle to find strength after undergoing a mastectomy.

Although many women still face gender bias in their experiences with the healthcare system, progress has been made toward a more equitable system. The Laura W. Bush Institute for Women's Health at Texas Tech University was founded in 2007, and has been a leader in the integration of "sex-specific instruction in medical education." The team at Texas Tech created a curriculum for medical schools to include sex-differences in medical education, and ten schools are currently using the curriculum. It is likely that bias against females patients will continue to exist in medicine, but medical schools and institutions are working toward addressing the problem, and will likely continue addressing it for a long time. Medical research is slow to move into the practice stage, so even as more research is done on bias against women and how to better treat women, it will be a long time before these effects are seen.