Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World

To paraphrase the great Maya Angelou: when a woman tells you she is in pain, believe her the first time.

Women are more likely to be offered minor tranquillisers and antidepressants than analgesic pain medication. Women are less likely to be referred for further diagnostic investigations than men. And women’s pain is much more likely to be seen as having an emotional or psychological cause, rather than a bodily or biological one.

Sadly, Truman’s social-reformist vision floundered amidst fierce criticism and suspicion. Fearing that such a socialist move was part of a communist plot, the Republican-controlled Congress rejected his proposal in 1946.

It was also acknowledged that an ovum wasn’t coaxed out of its hiding place by the ever-helpful penis

Today, endometriosis affects an estimated one in ten women across the world. It takes an average of between six and ten years to be correctly diagnosed. Nowhere near enough research and time has been spent on figuring out the cause of this debilitating disease; and this has led to a woeful lack of care and respect for sufferers.

Kramer also claimed that some witches collected penises, put them in bird boxes, and feed them oats and corn.

Durante siglos, la medicina ha afirmado que las mujeres y sus vidas están definidas por sus cuerpos y su biología. Pero jamás se nos ha respetado como narradoras creíbles de lo que les ha ocurrido, o les está ocurriendo, a nuestros cuerpos. Se nos niega nuestra propia agencia porque el mundo creado por el hombre favorece el conocimiento experto y aprobado en detrimento de nuestros propios pensamientos y sentimientos. En el relato médico profesional de la enfermedad y la afección no caben las experiencias propias de las mujeres.

«Nadie daña más la fe católica que las matronas», escribió.16Hacia el final del Malleus, Kramer declaraba que las brujas-matronas «superan a todas las demás brujas con sus crímenes», y que aquella maldad abundaba tanto que «apenas existe una diminuta aldea en la que no se haya hallado».

In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at Irwin County Detention Center, a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Georgia, alleged in a whistleblower complaint that an obstetrician-gynaecologist was performing ‘unwarranted’ and often non-consensual mass hysterectomies on detained women. According to Wooten, ‘everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody

For centuries, medicine has claimed that women are defined by their bodies and biology. But we have never been respected as reliable narrators of what happens to our bodies. We are denied agency because the man-made world privileges specialist, sanctioned knowledge over our own thoughts and feelings. There is no space in the professional medical narrative of illness and disease for women’s own experiences.

This hidden disease had shaped my relationship to my body, and with it the way I live as a woman in the world. But, as I have learned to live as an unwell woman, I have also learned that my history is a shared history. Written into the history of my disease are the histories of women whose suffering led to the formation of the medical knowledge that saved my life. The medical science that helped me heal would not exist without those women who, over centuries, struggled to have their pain recognised, valued, legitimised. The history of medicine is the history of unwell women, of their bodies, minds and lives. I owe them everything.

Shockingly, a drug considered too dangerous for chickens and men was somehow perfectly acceptable for women.

Today, up to one in ten people with vaginas, in the UK, and as many as 20 per cent in the US, experience pain during sex. But since sexual dysfunction is not prioritised as a medical concern unless you happen to be a heterosexual, cisgender man, vaginismus is frequently misdiagnosed as anxiety.

Although medicine now recognises how the trauma of sexual abuse and violence, and difficult childbirth, can lead to chronic pelvic pain, the ingrained connection between women’s mental health and their reproductive organs means the syndrome is often interpreted as a symptom of depression or anxiety.

Although medicine acknowledges that it can be caused by many diseases, including endometriosis, irritable bowel syndrome, ovarian cysts, pelvic inflammatory disease, fibroids, abscesses and uterine prolapse, the actual cause can be difficult to identify, and many sufferers are misdiagnosed.7 And, frustratingly, the long association between women’s pelvic pain and their emotions continues to stymie understanding.

When it was rubbed with a penis or touched with a finger, women experienced such intense physical pleasure that ‘their seed’ flowed ‘forth in all directions, swifter than the wind, even if they don’t want it to’.