I didn’t want to step up onto one of my soapboxes so soon, but I ran across this article earlier today. It talks about a study that finally disaffirmed a theory that a woman’s personality determined her susceptibility to breast cancer. Pish.
Women and the medical field have always had a bit of a rocky relationship. Up until the late twentieth century, almost all medical studies were conducted on men, and that includes studies geared toward women. Supposedly, our hormones messed up their tests. Of course, one would think that the hormones would need to be taken into consideration when creating medications and treatments specifically for women, but then again, what do I know? I don’t have a medical degree. All I have is an interest in medicine, and I’ll be the first to admit that even that’s a bit of a touch and go fancy.
But thinking “anti-emotionality” in women made them more prone to cancer? Thinking that any personality traits makes anyone more prone to cancer, regardless of gender, seems rather ridiculous to me, but I have yet to come across an article that makes such a claim between men and prostrate cancer. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such a theory between disease and personality was associated with women. Why not personality and some non gender-specific cancer? Why specifically breast cancer?
My mother brought up an interesting question when I sent her this article about a possible disease known as Morgellons. I’ve been reading information about this affliction off and on for about two years (maybe more), and the medical field has yet to determine whether or not this is an acutal disease. The article mentions that most doctors diagnose possible Morgellons sufferers with “delusional parasitosis” (ie they only think they’re sick), and when my mother and I were discussing the article she said, “What do you want to bet that most of the people with this are women?”
That made me pause. Granted, I haven’t been able to find out if she’s right or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of sufferers are women and children. For some reason, many within the medical profession (and note I did not say “all”) don’t seem to take women patients seriously. This is changing, I think, especially as more and more women enter the medical field, but still I feel there is some basic bias against taking women seriously. It’s like that “Golden Girls” episode (and yes, I know the irony of making a serious point using a sitcom, but it’s a good example) when Dorothy contracts chronic fatigue syndrome, and one of the first doctors she goes to tells her it’s essentially all in her head. I know this episode struck a cord with a lot of women because it’s a real issue.
For a real life example, take what happened to me about two years ago. I was having dizzy spells, most often when driving, and they would sometimes get so bad that I’d have to pull over, half afraid I’d pass out behind the wheel. I initially attributed it to sinuses and allergies (I was living in California and, at that time, smoke from a wildfire wreaked havoc on everyone’s sinuses), but after awhile I had to admit defeat and seek an expert opinion.
I didn’t have a doctor, so I scheduled an appointment with one close to the office where I worked and on the appointed day I went in, filled out all the paperwork, and was put into one of the pale blue rooms with the medical appartatus decor where a nurse took my vitals and then left. Twenty minutes later, the female doctor breezed in, asked about my symptoms, and declared my problem to be the result of “panic attacks”.
“But,” I said, “I’ve had a panic attack before, and these don’t feel like that.”
She assured me that panic attacks don’t all feel exactly the same and wrote me a prescription. “Are you allergic to anything?” she asked. At this point, she’d yet to touch me.
“But the dizziness goes away after only a couple of minutes,” I told her. “Don’t medications take at least fifteen minute to be absorbed into the system?” (Okay, so I wasn’t quite that verbose in our conversation, but that’s the gist of what I said.)
She finally began to look me over, listening to my heart and lungs, peering in all the cranial nooks and cranies with the little light on a stick that doctors love so much. “Just take it when you think you’re about to have a panic attack,” she said.
“But I don’t think I’m having panic attacks.”
She tsked, tsked me and wrote a prescription anyway. Needless to say, I never got it filled. I decided to get a second opinion but, because of the way my HMO was set up, I had to wait a month before I could get my insurance transferred over. The new doctor, ironically a man, became fairly indignant when I explained my prior experience. He looked me over, checked the results of some bloodwork, had me move my head this way and that, and then told me that he knew exactly what I had. “And,” he said, “it’s not panic attacks.”
“You’re going to laugh when I tell you this,” he continued, “but I’m going to cure you right here and now, and it won’t even take five minutes.”
“Wait–” I said, images of large needles tripping through my mind. “What is it?”
“Benign what-what?”
“It’s a problem in the inner ear that causes dizziness when you move your head a lot, which is why you get it so often when you’re driving. And I’m going to fix it right now.”
And he did. I haven’t had a problem since. (For those of you interested, the link above has a nice little animation of how BPV can be cured. Essentially, all the doctor had me do was rotate my head in a certain way and voila! No more dizziness.)
Sometimes I wonder if the first doctor would have dismissed my symptoms so easily if I’d been a man. Would she have been just as quick to declare it panic attacks and offer a quick fix with a prescription slip if I’d had a lot less estrogen and a lot more testosterone? Thankfully all I did have was a minor ear problem, but what would have happened if my symptoms had been indicative of something much worse, something more aggressive and more pervasive, especially since I’d been forced to wait an additional month for proper treatment?
Then again, maybe if I’d smiled more and worn an apron, I wouldn’t have had a problem in the first place.
