https://reasonstobecheerful.world/bridging-womens-health-gap/
"When Carolyn Thomas suffered her first heart attack in 2008, she was in her
fifties, a distance runner and as fit as can be. Yet the doctor in the ER
diagnosed her with acid reflux, sent her home without treatment and told her
she simply needed to rest.
“I felt so embarrassed for having made a big fuss over nothing that when my
symptoms later returned, there was no way I was going back to that ER for
help,” says Thomas, a PR manager in Victoria, Canada.
Two weeks later, she had another massive heart attack that proved nearly fatal.
The first doctor had not realized that Thomas was in the midst of a
life-threatening health crisis.
Men suffer heart diseases more frequently, but for women, they are more often
fatal. One reason has now been well-documented: Doctors primarily train with
the symptoms of middle-aged male patients and often miss the signs of the
“Eve-attack.”
“There are so many studies about coronary disease where women have been
completely excluded,” Thomas says. “I had textbook symptoms, including chest
pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down my left arm; if that ER doctor
had simply Googled my symptoms he would have found only one result.”
When asked, most women believe the number-one cause of death for women in the
US is breast cancer, but it is actually coronary disease. Yet women’s symptoms
are overlooked so frequently that after her own experience, Thomas became a
Mayo Clinic-trained women’s health advocate and, at the request of Johns
Hopkins cardiologists, wrote a book and started a blog about the issue, Heart
Sisters, where hundreds of women share similar experiences.
“I don’t know why there’s so much resistance to the notion of gender medicine
and why women are still trivialized and told with a disturbing frequency their
complaints are the result of emotional distress,” says renowned cardiologist
Marianne Legato, who has been instrumental in researching women’s health. In
1997, she founded the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia
University, and in 2006, she established the nonprofit Foundation for
Gender-Specific Medicine that she still chairs. Legato coined the phrase
“bikini medicine” to describe “the outdated notion [that] only women’s breasts
and their pelvis were of interest to us doctors, because that was the only
point of difference between the sexes.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
