"Is Medicine’s Gender Bias Killing Young Women?"

"focusing on what individual women do—or don’t do—when they’re having a heart attack is a way of subtly shifting the blame for the deep and systemic failures of our health care system onto its victims. In reality, the themes that emerged from the interviews with 30 women in the Yale study, as well as previous research on women and heart attacks, paint a more complicated—and even more disturbing—picture of how gender bias plays out on multiple levels, both within and outside the medical system, to affect women’s ability to get life-saving care in a crisis...

Although more women than men have died each year from cardiovascular-related causes since 1984, fewer than one in five doctors—primary care physicians, OB/GYNs, and even cardiologists—surveyed in a 2005 study knew that. And they tended to underestimate female patients’ personal risk for the disease, recommending fewer preventative measures to them compared to the men... Though there’s been slightimprovement since the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act mandated proportional representation of women and minorities in clinical trials in 1993, recommendations for preventing, diagnosing, and treating heart disease continue to be largely extrapolated from research conducted on white, middle-age men. Areview of the American Heart Association’s 2007 prevention guidelines for women, for example, found that they drew on studies in which women made up only 30 percent of the subject population...

The presence of stress, the researchers explained, sparked a “meaning shift” in which women’s physical symptoms were reinterpreted as psychological, while “men's symptoms were perceived as organic whether or not stressors were present... [Other] researchers also gave the patients a personality test gauging how closely they adhered to traditional gender roles and found that both men and women with more stereotypically feminine traits faced more delays than patients with masculine traits."

http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/is-medicines-gender-bias-killing-young-women

Stereotypes and stereotype threat kill.

I love love love how this ends.

Related: ADHD; female pain; days without breathe; morgellon's

FB: "This pervasive bias may simply be easier to see in the especially high-stakes context of a heart attack, in which the true cause usually becomes crystal clear—too often tragically—in a matter of hours or days. When it comes to less acute problems, the effect of such medical gaslighting is harder to quantify, as many women either accept misdiagnoses or persist until they find a health care provider who believes their symptoms aren’t just in their head."