Compare: For this blog I chose to talk about gender bias within health diagnoses. This is something not talked about very often because people don’t know about it, but it’s very true. Many Women each year are getting overlooked mainly by male doctors and it’s scary. My personal experience wasn’t good when I went to the emergency room. I went in because my heart was racing on and off, I didn’t know why. The first thing they did was test my blood for drugs and my urine to see if I was pregnant everything came back clear after waiting for the test they then hooked me up to the ekg machine to check my heart. After a couple hours they diagnosed me with Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) which causes the top and bottom of my heart to beat at the same time causing my heart to race. It was upsetting when they didn’t believe me and put everything I said to the side and tested me for drugs, most likely because I’m a women and they would think I was over reacting. The only other time I went into the emergency room was when I got the rigors which is uncontrollable shaking due to a high fever spike, they did the same thing and tested to see if I was on drugs or pregnant, once the tests came back clear they tested for the flu which also came back clear and they discharged me with out knowing what caused the fever spike. Both those happened at the Ellensburg hospital.
Summary: This article talks about the gender bias in medical industry. They led with this “Women are more likely to wait longer for a health diagnosis and to be told it’s ‘all in their heads’. That can be lethal: diagnostic errors cause 40,000-80,000 deaths in the US alone.” I absolutely thought that was horrible that these doctors could have saved that many lives if the would of just believed their patient. The article also talks about a recent study done in the United Kingdom that said one in three of the people diagnosed with a brain tumor had talked to a doctor about 5 before they were believed. One lady said she heard an GP make fun of her and say “what does she think she has a brain tumor” the lady then had to schedule appointments with the neurology department before being diagnosed. These are things that can be easily fixed If people would just listen to others, instead of poke fun of and thinking they’re just making it up. I think people need to see the statistics of how many people are lost due to no or late diagnoses
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