The terrific Jordan Rosenfeld is covering gender bias in her series “Hysterical Women and Medicine” for Medium. She asked me to weigh in on a few things, and I introduced my concept of the gyno ghetto and lack of evidence-based clinical guidelines. A few of my quotes below and you can read the entire article and series, here.
“Meghan Cleary, a writer, speaker, and advocate specializing in clinical gender bias and founder of the website Bad Periods, a repository of research based on personal experience, finds the lack of knowledge frustrating and insulting. “The NIH [National Institutes for Health] didn’t require that women be included in medical studies until 1991, and that’s only government studies,” she points out. “It was only in 2011 that they figured out women present with heart attacks differently. There is very little clinical information [about women’s bodies].”
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These kinds of stories come as no surprise to Cleary, who herself spent years trying to get accurately diagnosed with life-altering endometriosis. “Anything that is below the belly button on women gets put in the ‘gyno ghetto,’” Cleary says. “Anything having to do with your period automatically is not as valued,” Cleary adds.”
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However, many of the issues associated with vaginal bleeding and pelvic pain are not actually related to menstruation, Cleary points out. “They’re endocrine-related. Even though you’re bleeding out of your vagina during your period, it’s not 100 percent a period problem. You have a fibroid in your body because your endocrine system is not processing extra estrogen, for example,” she says.
Many women get their advice from their OB-GYNS, but Cleary is not a huge fan of the way OB-GYNs are trained, believing their expertise too diffuse. “They may deliver a baby on Monday, do a fibroid surgery on Tuesday, and then a hysterectomy on Thursday. There’s no other specialty like that,” she says.
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In a world that treats almost all vaginal bleeding as menstruation-related (and even just women being hysterical), Cleary encourages those with such conditions as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), interstitial cystitis, and the like to talk to their care providers “not in gynecological terms, but organ dysfunction, pain, blood loss, and anemia,” because that’s what it takes to be treated seriously.”
You can read the entire article and series, here.