As an ER doc: if I treated everyone for the level of pain they claim to have, half the bloody ER would be on i.v. opioids. That said, some of the stories in this comment section make me question the sanity of some collegues. You wont leave our ER without an extensive blood workup, and if youre there for pretty much any amount of belly pain, you wont leave it without an ultrasound either. How are these people's tumors going undiagnosed for years? What's happening??? Is this an american thing?
It’s other conditions besides pain, too. I’ve had a seizure disorder since I was 2, but no neurologist has ever been able to diagnose what it is. If a seizure gets bad enough and becomes a grand mal, I go unconscious and my airway clamps down, so I have to be intubated in order to force air into my lungs. I bit off part of my tongue when I was 6 and have brain damage from being deprived of oxygen for 10 minutes when I was 2. I went to a new neurologist a few years ago to get paperwork signed for college disability letters, and he did all the same tests that I’ve had before. As always, there was nothing that could give a conclusive diagnosis. Then, I mentioned that I have PTSD from some abuse that happened to me, and, suddenly, the neurologist lit up. He declared that I have a conversion disorder. I went home and looked it up. “Conversion disorder” is effectively the 21st-Century term for hysteria. The doctor decided that my seizures were all from stress being converted into neurological problems-problems that he said aren’t really there and would go away if I stopped being stressed. This man decided that my 2-year-old self just got too stressed and decided to seize, go unconscious, stop breathing for 10 minutes, and get permanent brain damage. I was so angry. I met another person with my same seizure symptoms, and she said the exact same thing: all the same tests, no real diagnosis, except she was never given the hysteria label. I guess she and I just have some unknown seizure condition.
@@eternallife8898No, they literally thought the womb moved throughout the woman's body, causing emotional stress. That's how primitive gynecology was.
It’s even worse when you truly have those conditions and then, for real, have something wrong! They see anxiety and hypochondria in your chart and don’t believe a word you’re telling them. (And then it turns out you have gallstones and you weren’t making things up after all! Shocking!)
I had an amniocentesis (using an ultrasound to guide the needle, a procedure used to take out a small sample of the amniotic fluid surrounding a baby for testing), and my male doctor told me it would not hurt, and would just be a bit uncomfortable. I was surprised because it hurt very, very badly. I must have whimpered because he looked surprised and asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he looked at me with disbelief and repeated “it’s not supposed to hurt at all.” Doesn’t feel very good to not be believed. If you look up the statistics, there is a wide range of pain and non-pain reactions amongst women for this procedure. For some women, it most definitely hurts.
@@kevincaruthers5412 “nursing school” - nurses don’t prescribe major painkillers or controlled drugs, so your drug seeking patient is not so interested in them (even though their pain is still real - just has a different cause) But other patients can benefit from the empathetic approach that validates their experience. The brain will continue to increase the experience of pain until it feels it has been taken notice of.
I'm autistic and finally got diagnosed at 42! I was diagnosed ADHD at 18, after my family did our OWN research to prove it. I am desperately trying to undo all the psychological damage that was ingrained into me from the time I was a child - it's unbelievably hard. Highly recommend Mom on the Spectrum here on YT - Her videos have really helped me!
@@kateshiningdeer3334 I'm a male diagnosed with ADHD at 40 and my psychological situation is a catastrophe too. Thank you for the channel recommendation, I'll look into it and good luck with your life and therapy
I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until my 30s, and I'm still struggling to get my autism diagnosis at 45. I've been told they won't prescribe effective ADHD meds to me because I wasn't diagnosed before the age of 12. They didn't think little girls in the 1980s could have ADHD, even when I was sent to a specialist because of how disruptive I was in class. 🤔
My mom had abdominal pain for several years. She KNEW something was wrong but was ignored. She had colon cancer 😢 it killed her because they didnt even test her until she refused to leave the office 4yrs AFTER the pain started.
It was a similar story with my maternal grandmother nearly 50 years ago. It didn't help that she had a bit of a Thing about bowel movements and regularity and so she regularly took a lot more laxatives than she should have. This may have masked symptoms and/or made doctors think that the problem was due to laxative overuse, rather than otherwise. Again, by the time she actually go a diagnosis, it was too late to deal with the cancer, especially in those days when treatment options were more limited than they are now.
Absolutely Tragic. You have my sincere condolences. The whole system can be innately corrupt in many instances. But even if those instances are not the majority (which they are, but even after giving the benefit of the doubt) the entire system should be reworked.
I've had issues that thankfully didn't get that bad before I was able to put my foot down. Collectively, as women, we need to start just refusing to leave until we're given at minimum a referral for testing. I always forced administrators to do their jobs by finding their offices and refusing to leave until they sent the stupid email I needed, why should doctors get more respect? Every fool in the world has to be forced to do the bare minimum but if you need it and you know they can do it, force them! Don't fight or anything, but just refuse to leave without something to go forward with. Being firm can be hard, especially if you're used to being mild mannered or people pushing you around. It can help to think about how you would feel if someone was treating your child this way, your mom this way, etc. How angry you would be, how you'd push them and never take no for an answer. Your life and your health is just as important as everyone else you love, so take up so much space that the doctor's preconceived notions don't fit into the room anymore. Nothing got me to treatment except making it more inconvenient to dismiss my issues than to "humor me" by giving a referral to a test. Let them think I have a mental disorder! As long as I get my scan/blood test/whatever I don't care, because when my results come back showing something is wrong, I'll have data to bring to a new doctor who might take me seriously this time.
My friend’s sister went to hospital with delirious pain. Hospital kept sending her home even though it was prolonged and told her it was the flu and to take some paracetamol. She was dead two days later from undiagnosed meningococcal. Women are expected to get on with it as if their pain is natural or accepted as as fact of life.
My condolences to you and I hope your sister may rest without pain. Did you file a suit for medical malpractice/negligence? Surely that is in complete violation of the Hippocratic oath, among numerous other laws?!
i have to make a counterpoint here, same thing happened to my neighbour and a farmer i know doctors can be arrogant but in this case it is not sex related
My friend's behavior got really erratic in her late 40's and she went to the doctor saying she felt something was wrong with her brain. Rather than doing any tests, he diagnosed with bipolar disorder, even though she never she had never shown any signs of it before. Things continued to get deteriorate, and after an incident she was admitted to the hospital where they found she actually had melanoma that had spread into her brain. It was stage four by that time and there was little they could do. She died and left behind two kids.
Oh good lord I am so sorry, that took the fucking breath out of my lungs for a minute. A living fucking nightmare, I hope you have some form of legal recourse
How could that doctor even diagnose her with bipolar disorder when that's something for extensive testing with a _psychologist_ to handle?! That is so rage inducing. I am so sorry for your loss...
Disgusting. I'm so sorry that happened. I cannot imagine how her children will feel when they get older and realize how the medical system treated their mom in the worst way possible.
I just remembered that news story about how someone was stealing the injectable pain medication from a women's health clinic, replacing it with saline. They got away with doing this *for YEARS* because nobody believed the patients when they said that the pain meds didn't work.
I read of a nurse stealing drugs and using TAP WATER to replace with and the patients got horrible infections. NOW let's have the conversation about how badly women in healthcare treat other women. NOPE, they sure don't have our backs.
What shocks me is that many of those medical people were WOMEN. WOMEN refusing to believe other women. So much for the sister. I just know that there was one nurse who was mentioning to everyone that this isn't normal, that something was wrong with the meds, and being ignored that whole time.
@@vociferonheraldofthewinter2284 It’s their modus operandi. There have to be LEGIONS of complaining patients before they take action. What ever happened to erring on the side of caution??? AND I totally agree about our false motion that women care MORE. They are trained to be just like men in medicine. Callous, indifferent, self/concerned.
This is why, as a disabled woman, I now bring my spouse to all appointments and procedures. I didn't get most of my diagnoses until AFTER I got married, even though I had been dealing with symptoms from them all since my teens!
Girl this same shit happened to me. It's unbelievable how much better the medical treatment is when a man is there to back you up. If I say I wake up in pain 5-8x a night I'm exaggerating, if my husband says "she wakes up 5-8x a night crying in pain" suddenly its real.
I just got married and didn't know about this extra "perk" - I'm for sure going to do this when I really need to be heard. Sad it's necessary but good to know 🙏
Seriously, I knew a guy that got a vasectomy that took 15 minutes and was given the best pain meds. Meanwhile, a friend of mine had horrible pain from a broken arm in 4 places and it was a mission to get meds that could help her. It turned out they had set the bones incorrectly so she had to go over the whole thing again. I just couldn't believe the difference of ease between the 2. It still blows my mind
I, a woman, have had 3 surgeries, 1 serious procedure and have been diagnosed with two conditions which can cause a lot of pain. I was told to take an obscene amount of Tylenol and Advil to help with the pain--those things don't touch my pain. I have a close man friend who had pain at work and I drove him to the hospital. They treated him with IV pain meds, took him seriously when he said he had pain and where and, despite blood work and scans, found nothing wrong. They chalked it up to a maybe perhaps could be kidney stone and discharged him with a prescription for Norco, told him to drink beer and wrote him an excuse for work. It was like being in two different worlds. I had been in that exact hospital two months earlier and was treated like crap and a liar. Amusing twist, I picked up his meds and his beer. He told me to take those Norco home with me because "I don't take those things and hell, this doesn't even hurt that bad." I don't have words for this insanity. My health issues are visible under scope and via blood work and I get made to feel like a liar.
I've had three surgeries in my life, and the third one was the most minor of them, but when I woke up, I was in extreme pain, like 10 out of 10 pain. It took two hours to get pain meds, which helped tremendously... and which makes me wonder if I was not given any pain treatment at all during the surgery. The prescription for pain meds ran out before I recovered, and I needed to get my _other_ doctor to prescribe enough for two weeks.
@@helendancelot It is hard to say for specific cases, but the trend of women getting worse treatment absolutely is one based in sexism. Sometimes it is sexism from old practices, such as misdiagnosing specific women's conditions, such as endometriosis often getting overlooked. You don't need to be sexist for that, just to have been taught how to do medicine by a system that is sexist. There is also the more personal kind of sexism, when doctors treat women as lesser. Acting as if they are hysterical, making shit up, and acting as if the doctor knows their own symptoms better than they do.
Yeah I regularly have chest pain caused by muscle spasms. It's automatically assumed it's just "Anxiety". They never actually got rid of hysteria. They just call it anxiety now.
@@jbach1738 Of course then they turn around and don't take actual anxiety seriously either. "It's not that bad" "Just calm down" "Stop being dramatic". Etc. So it it a bad enough condition to cause symptoms of excruciating pain or not? The answer with this and many other things is "Whatever will let them blow off a marginalized patient."
The fact that I have anxiety and went untreated for a long time because I thought I was paranoid, and a old male doctor suspected about my condition, and gave me anxiety medication so now I'm feeling better.... Yeah, it took 10 YEARS or more (11 or 12), and even thou my own MOTHER noticed something wrong but didn't sent me to doctor till I was heavily depressed and isolated....😢😢😢😢
I, a woman, have been profoundly failed by medicine again and again. As a slim 21-year-old, I had edema in my legs and excruciating pain in one foot that would be bad enough to cripple me. It only took 30+ years to be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. Just 30.
It’s a disease of young age , more common in female , if you had ever presented with joint pain this would be the first d/d . on the otherhand osteoarthritis is a different entity , it’s a disease common in older people .
My mom got lucky and was diagnosed within about a year, but they didn't give her any pain medications that didn't cause problems with the arthritis medication. My mom was so lucky that I could teach her a bit about researching online so she figured out which foods trigger reactions. She keeps up with the medication of course, but flare ups only happen if she overworks herself and she has pain medication that helps. The doctors said food has no effect, I suspect most arthritis studies with food have only been done on gout so the other forms are ignored since they're not caused quite as much by food.
@@muhtasimfuad1945I did, in fact, have the joint pain with the edema -at 21 years of age-. I didn’t get any medical help with the pain or inflammation (which had never gone away) until I was 53.
My mom was in severe pain for months, the doctor said her crohns was flaring up due to a virus. Finally she demanded an MRI and she had a giant tumor on her pancreas. Stage 4 cancer, she died 6 weeks later. I will never forgive the way she was dismissed when she knew something was terribly wrong.
I changed 3 gynecologists by now because all of them refuse to test me for endometriosis which I am highly suspicious of due to extremely crippling cramps and painful bowel movement. I was told how I am "just hysterical" and "need to take anti-anxiety meds". If cis men could get periods, medicine would improve thousand-fold. My mom's breast cancer was dismissed as "the pain is all in the head", until my dad was yelling at the doctors to check her on mammograph. The cancer was diagnosed way too late and she died back in 2020. I am so angry as I am typing this, our Serbian healthcare system is consisting of murderers and butchers.
They will get theirs but sometimes we aren't witnesses to that. It's a leap of faith and good people doing good is what counts. Get out and spread the word, help to reform a broken system, set up foundations in your mom's name to aid in better healthcare for women and to honor your mother. There are things you can do to show you're not broken.
@@NinjanimegamerI don’t know what la la la land you are living in - no doubt live in the USA! Do you think the average person in Serbia - especially dealing with pain and long term health issues in the family has the money, time or energy to ‘start a foundation’ or get the system changed….
God all these dismissive answers just make me think "even if that is true, is that not still a problem?" like, if anxiety causes IBS, there are medicines you can take for IBS. If you have psychosymatic pain, it is still fucking painful and should be treated, not dismissed as being all in the head. 😢
Dr. Karan, with social media and other outlets, showing frequently how healthcare for women is very different from men, and also showing there is a real need to understand women’s bodies and health, is there more being done to correct this? Are there studies and research happening currently?
Ok, not very well-versed in issue, but can't it be that nowadays there are less female volunteers than male ones? Like, how they gonna test someone, if subject is unwilling? Not saying it's a whole issue, but maybe it's part of it.
@@kakhakheviashvili6365this definitely is part of the problem. Men are much more likely to take risks, like a new drug or trying different dosages to see how it goes. A clinical trial with women is a lot more difficult to do.
My sister had her tubes tied, and the idiot doctor told her it wasn't a big deal, minimal pain, scheduled it for her lunch hour, and told her she could go straight back to work after (she works for the telephone company, in the buildings where all the wires are, and she's constantly climbing up and down ladders to check circuits, etc. Or something like that. I'm not going to pretend I understand electricity). After the surgery, she had to call her husband to come pick her up because she was having horrible cramps and bleeding like a really bad period. She was out of work for 2 days (prolly only because the surgery was on a Wednesday, and it wasn't her weekend to work).
@@SaheeliRaino heavy lifting for 2 weeks after, which wasn't too much of an issue (the guys she worked with moved/carried any spools of wire she needed). And only Tylenol or motrin for pain. Effing dingus doctors.
@@RamenNoodle1985 What? It's one month of no heavy lifting here! None at all for 2 weeks and then you can start lifting light things in week 3 and slowly increase weight 😧
@@KxNOxUTA yeah, after watching what happened to her, I've made sure I only have woman doctors, and even then, pap smears suck cause my doctor's clinic only carries 1 size, and it's too big and hurts like crazy.
For 5 years Dr's kept saying my abdominal pain, problems peeing and having bowel movements, weight loss and severely heavy periods were anxiety and an eating disorder. I had a fucking tumor. They thought my weightloss was more likely me starving myself despite me constantly telling them I eat a lot. My stomach issues were a "nervous stomach" and pain was a normal part of being a woman and I should stop exaggerating. I'm still bitter. I didn't get diagnosed until I almost died from blood loss and starvation. The tumor was in my uterus and it was pressing on my bladder and intestines.
Imagine if being a woman was actually naturally as painful as they think. At that point I'm pretty sure natural selection would've selected women out of existence and men would just start asexually reproducing lol because there is no way an existence that is literal constant pain for half the population would last under selective pressures.
My dad has been admitted anytime he’s shown up. For any random bs. My mom was sent home thrice from the hospital with pneumonia, told it was “just a chest cold stop being paranoid” and to keep working. Finally the 4th visit they said they were surprised she was alive and hadn’t collapsed or died in her sleep from sheer fatigue, her oxygen levels were incredibly low and she had pneumonia (PNEUMONIA NOT WALKING PNEUMONIA) for three plus months.
That exact same thing happened to me when I had pneumonia. I was 27 years old, 5'6" and dropped all the way down to 100 pounds. The nurse listened to my lungs and said my "soft breathing" was very concerning, along with the weight loss, and my overall weakness. It took me 20 minutes to walk from my car to the emergency room even though I was parked right in front. I could barely move from weakness and exhaustion and the ER doc poked his head in and said "she just needs to go home and rest, it's probably just a virus." I'm lucky my mom flew into town and found a doctor who would take me seriously. When he saw my chest x-ray he said "you should be in the hospital. How did the ER miss this?!?" Also, that useless ER visit ended up costing me almost $3000.00. I was charged $250 at the time for the visit, then later a bill for $600ish for the "doctor consult" and another bill of $2000 for the ER came in the mail. I'm 43 now and still get angry when I think about that damn ER visit.
This kind of thing happens to both men and women. Also, men tend to be very slow to address health problems so by the time they go to the doctor, they are in bad shape. This isn't a simple "doctors hate women" issue
My wife was victim to dr's dismissal of women's pain for years. Her gp routinely ignored her back pain for years. It wasn't until she told her Dr that I thought the pain was serious that he sent her for a ct scan. The scan showed all kinds of damage to her spine. She's had a very similar response when she attended the pain clinic. 🤬🤬
And, dare I say it, my gut feeling is that pain clinics are largely bullshit. From what I've seen they seem to work on the premise that pain can be dealt with by meditation or giving yourself a good talking to, or things of that sort.
I was told with abdominal pain (severe) and unable to eat or drink that it was in my head. They would admit me, put me on tpn, discharge me and say I was fine. Went on for months. Finally a doctor tested my gallbladder. It was not functioning I was then told "Well your pain isn't as bad as we would normally expect, so we are going to discharge you and see how you are in a month." I was admitted again severely dehydrated and in pain in less than 8 hours. They refused to give me pain meds waiting 36 hours for the surgery. I was told after words that my gallbladder had been 100% blocked in the bile duct by gallstones, and they were sorry they didn't do anything sooner. The surgeon who came in post op asked why they hadn’t taken the Tylenol they had prescribed pre surgery for pain, and I told him I hadn't been able to keep anything down. Fun times.
That's terrible! I had an acute gallbladder (gangrenous) and they gave me Fentanyl x1, something for the nausea, antibiotics and morphine every 4 hours until my surgery. When I was still having pain between morphine doese, they offered me an NSAID as well, but I opted for an ice pack. *That's* how it should be handled.
@lauraelliott6909 First, I'm glad you got it dealt with and are better. Second, yeah, that sounds like they managed it, really well. I think it was at least part of that hospital, though. I was left in a waiting room for 6 hours with compartment syndrome (i was bleeding into my leg, and couldn'tstand. , then told I wasn't getting anything for the pain and that there was nothing wrong (calf purple, hard as a rock, and the size of a cantaloupe. That I could deal with the throwing up. (I was, but from pain). Said he was discharging me. And my mom made the PA get a doc, but that took 4 hours only for him To be horrified that no one had mentioned my leg to him, (he came in when they found out I needed blood), and was shocked no one gave me pain meds (gave me dilaudid) and got me rushed to surgery. (After I was told I had been 20 minutes from an amputation, and should have been in surgery hours earlier, and had I left, I would have lost the leg. And probably would have gone into septic shock and died) Another time they said ovarian torsion wasn't causing me any pain. That it was just some pain from the cyst and to go home and take Tylenol (no test to even see if there was an issue until I demanded a new doc.) Then was again rushed to surgery.
And it's even worse when we're red-headed. I recently had remediation surgery at a plastic surgeon's office under local anesthetic. I was terrified because every time I've had stitches in the past, the doctor wouldn't believe I COULD FEEL the stitches going in - they said I was just scared and "it's okay". So when I reminded the nurses at the plastic surgeon that I will need MORE anesthetic than most folks, they were doubtful. Once they started, they were amazed at the number of shots they had to give me before I could no longer feel anything....... Then they left me sitting in the room for a half hour before starting! Needless to say, they had to stop periodically to give me more shots in specific places where the anesthetic either wore off, or never reached the right spot. The trauma of going through that kind of thing over and over and over again, of never being trusted because I'm a woman, of being labeled a drug seeker when I warn they will need to give me more because I metabolize it differently than everyone else... yeah, that wears on a person and destroys trust in the medical community.
Ah! Me getting minor surgery: am given one dose of local. Asked, "Can you still feel that?" Answer, "Yes." Given second dose of local. Asked, "Can you still feel that?" Answer, "Yes." Doctor looks at use-by date on the bottle (sees it's not expired). Usually says, "Well I *_can't_* give you any more," other than the most recent doctor who said, "Well, I can't give you any more, you've already had the elephant dose." I'm not red headed (and don't have the genes for red hair) but there are a lot of situations where local just doesn't cut it for me.
Yeah, I often barely respond to local anesthesia too. Not sure how many red-head genes I have (just a hint probably) but it's also known to be correlated to neurodivergence. Had several bad experiences but the cake goes to the dental surgeon who complained that he "couldn't work like this" when I was crying on the table cause it hurt so much but he ASSURED me it was only pressure that I felt. That man can go rot in hell for eternity if it's up to me. Basically removing one of my molars without any (effective) anesthesia and daring to complain.
@@DanielledeVreede Read your comment out loud to my husband. So sorry this happened to you. Thank you for educating us about the neurodivergence aspect. My husband finally had a dental procedure where the dentist told him he probably had the Ginger Gene. My husband has dark brown-blackish hair but has been suffering with different procedures for years. They gave him so much meds during his colonoscopy that he passed out and still could feel the pain as he did. We’ll look into the neurodivergent aspect which does apply to him. Thanks!
I have that too. I had to have one of my teeth drilled with (to me) no anesthesia, because they decided they couldn't give me any more. My current dentist has it written in big letters in my chart that I need a double dose, and I still remind them every time. I'm glad they look at all the work I've had and figure I probably know what I'm talking about.
I had a kidney stone in my right ureter that I was told by a hospital ER doctor was small enough to pass on its own. Six months and 4 attacks of excrutiating pain later, it was finally recommended that I see a uroligist. She had me in for surgical removal two days later because the stone hadn't move one centimeter in all that time and was firmly stuck in the wall of my ureter. My right kidney was distended from not being able to empty properly and she had to insert a stent in my ureter to keep it open long enough for the injury caused by having to extract the stone to heal. The few men that I've known who had kidney stones all received shock wave lithotripsy to break them up on their first visit to the ER.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the size of your kidney stone fell into the category of “send patient home and allow to pass naturally” because the study the guidance came from was all male patients that have larger ureters. So much science and medical guidance is based on only male physiology.
I was misdiagnosed 4 times over a 6 month period, all the time becoming more and more disabled. I went from hiking 40 miles a day to the point where I could barely move, and it still took 2 weeks to order a blood test. After being told repeatedly all I had to do was physiotherapy and it was my fault for not doing it enough, or not doing right, when I physically couldn't. turned out I had osteoporosis and had fractures all over my body. Now trying to get back to physical fitness, the whole ordeal has been a nightmare. I can't know if I'd have been treated any differently if I'd been a man, but I sure wasn't taken seriously as a women.
@@KlaudiuszegBut if you don't know you HAVE fractures, how would you even get that tested for? This whole case is insane. Someone should have at least LOOKED to see what was going on!
My PT doesn’t even give me exercises lol My body is just wrecked Pinched nerves My life is ruined, can’t work, barely do my ADLs, always in pain unless I lay flat Ppl w/o pain don’t get it I’m in crushing poverty now
It frustrates me that even some women will put other women down. I was having lunch with co-workers and shared a few bad experiencs I had at a GP and hospital which inevitably landed me in emergency somewhere else because none of the medical practitioners cared to listen to me earlier. When I told my story, the response I got was, 'well you know your body better than anybody else so you needed to take initiative' .... Jeez, I wonder what medical professionals are here for? Maybe I should've done my own ultrasound at home and ripped open my abdomen with a steak knife! Becase that was all that was left! :D How unwomanly of me.
Their reaction is a reaction to reality in which we indeed can not really on professionals sometimes, tragically so. However it is completely valid that you should have had compassion first. What they did, was attending by the "fix" method, rather than actually attending to your emotions by "listening and validating" method. It's a common problem. Ppl want to help in situations they feel helpless in BECAUSE they care. I hope you can feel safe enough with your friends to actually bring this up. And to openly tell them what you had hoped to receive instead. Because unfortunately that, too, is not something we can depend on friends on. They're typically not taught to attend to emotions sufficiently and take them seriously, due to still the very same sexism. Thank you for speaking up here. This IS a very valid issue. It hurts when you've been mistreated and we're already in a vulnerable position but then still are burdened with having to advocate for yourself and even teach ppl how to help. It's the WORST time to expect ppl to be self-reliant and strong. 😢 It shouldn't be that way and you should have had proper support by the medical professionals and your friends + the hurdle for advocating for yourself should really be "This doesn't seem to work for me, are there any options we're not considering/unilising yet?" and that to be followed by grace.
Yeah that speaks VOLUMES to the sorry, sad state of female healthcare where you live and in general... That we, as a rule CANNOT rely on just one doctors opinion, that women have to SCREAM and FIGHT just to be heard and if you do anything less its seen as "not advocating properly for yourself" is a sign. A big, brightly glowing neon sign. And the sign is not saying anything good... I'm so sorry you had to encounter that; they should have reacted first with compassion to your struggles and offered their advice as proper advice, not a condemnation of your attempts to get help. It's absurd that we live in a time like this but yet people STILL think it SHOULD be the norm to have to scream and throw hands and turn into an "uber Karen" just to get anywhere with your own medical health. It should not be so expected to have issues getting medical professionals to listen to us that when we don't manage it we get CRITICIZED for "not doing enough". I've heard this before, not to me but overheard, and it disgusted me then too. Support should be all they offer, not judgement against you. If they judged, it should have been the medical "pros" who mangled your care!
@@YeshuaKingMessiah And it won’t get legally forced to as long as these whining women don’t sue, they just expect someone else to do it. Stupidity in a nutshell
I remember years back in the days when they made Home visits if needed, they were very good. Now I just wonder if people too often become a doctor because it was a highly respected position. Now all we seem to get is a tablet which when one investogates seem to have nasty side effects.
I remember when I was a child, 13 years old, and went to the doctor because of migraine attacks. I was dismissed, it wasn't possible in a child. I came back a while later, it became disabling in my daily life. Again, "it's just stress". The third time my mother came along. She got angry. Like, very angry. Mind you, this doctor, was our family doctor. He knew my parents on a personal level. Yet he still dismissed my physical health. This isn't only women. It's also children. The reason I mention his personal connection with my parents is because my mother was diagnosed with migraines. And her sister. And her brother. And her mother. And her mother in law, even. The entire family had it. But because of my age, I was dismissed. It took an angry mother to set him straight, and I can bet on it if they weren't familiar on a personal level, he'd have send us away with nothing. Needless to say I changed doctors and my life improved since. I've made it a mission to find female doctors since, because I don't want to spend time convincing a doctor my problem is real. And of course several years after this experience it became a topic in the news, newspapers wrote about it yadda yadda how 'suddenly' a lot of teenagers had migraines. No, they were simply ignored for decades. It's not new. It was simply ignored. But because it's "mostly women" who suffer from migraines, they had no reason to care. My mother, her mother and her sister were dismissed for decades because they were women. It's disgusting. PS if anyone finds the story curious, in my country it's normal to go to the doctor alone if you want to even if you're very young. You're not forced to bring your parents to protect clients, so that's a good thing. My mother wanted me to learn these experiences from a very young age and I'm glad she did, it shaped me and made me stand up for myself.
I had them since I was a child too, but from about 7yrs old, my Dad used to get them, my sister gets them occasionally, but because it was the early 70’s I didn’t go to the Dr. They’re so debilitating.
@@wolfsdream499Yup. Sexism is systematic default and subconscious. It's not even a better of people being bad ppl. They're just misogynistic by default UNLESS they utilise feminism and actively start to re-learn the pattern. And the thing is, that even as a feminist I wouldn't dare to state I'm beyond sexism. Hell no! Sorting out stuff in the subconscious is a hecking lot of hard and permanent work, especially while the systemic signals are STILL in process of being revised veeeeeeery sloooowly. 😮💨
And even when the pain is in your head (like psychosomatic) it’s not treated like the serious medical condition that it is. It took me ten years to find out there are real treatments for that, and it has nothing to do with a doctor rolling their eyes and telling me to ignore it
Absolutely! The pain is real, it’s just the cause is from the brain not the particular body part. All pain is real and triggered by the brain, but sometimes the brain misinterprets the info it gets
YES!!!! My husbands suffers from anxiety paired with flare-ups of hypochindriac and psychosomatic episodes. It is HELL when he has one of those episodes because no doctor takes him seriously. "Oh its just your imagination it's not real just ignore it" i hate it so much! They grinded so long in his self esteem with that BS that now every time he has an episode I have to reassure him, that YES he has pain/symptoms of any kind, they ARE real and imeven if we can not treat the root of it he CAN treat the symptom.
In my country, there is still no possibility of women having an epidural or getting any kind of painkiller after getting birth. And not only that, doctors will tell and "educate" women that the delivery is healthier for the baby when the mother feels pain. My friend had issues and the baby couldn't come out no matter how hard she pushed...instead of giving her an emergency c - section, they called in an obese nurse to press on her abdomen. This is their "equipment", an obese nurse. My friend fainted, they had to do the surgery anyway. The nurse pushing on top of her caused internal hemorrage. The baby almost died. And it happens a lot. A lot of young healthy women and their babies don't survive and if they do they are traumatized. This was the primary reason why I decided not to have children.
Omg this is horrific! I was the same, I fainted everytime I pushed and my baby spent 30 hours not moving (apparently he was comfortably sleeping while I was in labor 😂). They took me into theatre and used forceps and ONE MINUTE later he was born. I cannot imagine what happened to your friend. I’m so sorry that happens to women in this day and age. 😢
At 13 I discovered a "divet" in my perineum. It took 5yrs for doctors to stop bouncing me from GYNO to Gastro (the divet collapsed, gained abscesses, etc etc) for someone to finally just order an MRI and tell me it was an anal fistula. It then took another 4 years for them to deem it "bad enough" to perform surgery to close it up. I lived in a tropical country, the sweat would collect inside and cause atleast 6 abscesses a year that had to be drained from surgery. Even after diagnoses and a history of draining on my chat. I would have to argue with ER doctors about "yes, it's a fistula, no an ultrasound won't show you it, fine let's waste my time, my money and everyone else's time with scanning just for you to say "we couldn't see anything, oh well, let's just slice up that abscess and send you home". >_>
When I got my Tubes Tied they discovered that I have endometriosis. I was still sent him with absolutely no pain medication and told that recovery is usually only a few days. Including surgery day, I took a whopping 2 days off of work.
I was diagnosed with endometriosis only after I went to the ER in severe pain. I had a huge endometrial cyst on my right ovary. I was 32. The years of telling doctors about the debilitating pain I experienced during my periods, irregular cycles, excessively heavy/long periods were ignored for 15 years. The difficulties I had trying to conceive were ignored for 5 years. It wasn't until I was talking to my sister and best friend one day that I realized not everyone has periods as painful as mine.
@@MelissaTroll right? What a joke. If I had a nickle for every time I was told my level of pain during periods was normal, I could've afforded better health care lol.
@@brittanyr9471 Even with better health care, there is basically no cure. You can surgically remove the tissues of the endometriosis, but it grows back. And that was also something no doctor told me or the internet. I heard it from another girl 😂
Right if you are living in the bathroom on your period because it hurts too much to walk to the bathroom, that isn't normal. I grew up thinking that way too.
I "lucked out" for getting diagnosed, but the doc's "cure" was unhinged like what century are you from. At 15 I went to the hospital with excruciating pain that for a while they feared was appendicitis but was eventually (after CT scan and ultrasound) they diagnosed as an ovarian cyst. I was given some pain killers and birth control to take for a few months. Then at 17 when I was still having severe pain on and off (not just during my period) I went back to the gyno who treated me in the hospital and he scheduled a laparoscopy a month later. He came in to see me before I went in for surgery and said "You're here for the hysterectomy, right?" When I said no, he flipped through my chart and said "Oh ya, that's right. I've been on vacation for a month, I forgot." I was diagnosed from that with endometriosis. The unhinged part was he said I could cure my endometriosis by getting pregnant, and then handed me a pamphlet about endo that said some women experience a temporary relief of symptoms while pregnant but it does not cure endometriosis. Oh, he also recommended I get pregnant to cure the ovarian cyst when I was 15 because I was still having pain after 3 months. Even if getting pregnant was a cure for either condition, TEEN pregnancy is not a solution to anything.
HE RECOMMENDED THAT?! TEEN PREGNANCY IS DANGEROUS! Plus, what was he going to do if you actually followed through with his advice?! Kids have been kicked out for that!
The misconception that pregnancy cures diseases dates back to ancient greece. It's horrifying any modern doctor believes that, it's as bad as bloodletting.
I have adenomyosis and suspect estrogen dominance. A burst ovarian cyst put me in the ER. If anyone knew how much I hate making a big deal of things, they would know how much I hated to have to seek medical help. The ER gave me morphine and they were watching possible infection develop since the contents of the cyst spill into the abdomen. Do your own research, of course, but I found help taking over the counter bio-identical progesterone cream. I also went on a low-carb diet that I think helped as well.
Not sure if this applies, but I had an experience at a dental office where my pain levels were very different than what they believed I had and the staff decided to go with their expectations rather than what I was saying. I had a dentist tell me after giving me a little shot that I shouldn’t feel anything as he went to pulling out my tooth. I told him I could feel everything. He went on to jab me with something pokey and asked me what he did, and I told him. We did this a few times more with me asking if he could finally inject more of the stuff. He got frustrated and insisted it was “pressure” I felt. He said if I didn’t cooperate and let him do the removal, he’d have to cancel and hire an anesthetic person to come in and who knew when that might be. I had to sit crying and screaming as quietly as I could while this man proceeded to remove four teeth with what felt an awful lot like two tablespoons. Yes, I felt everything though I “wasn’t supposed to”.😒I never went back.
That’s horrifying. I’m so sorry. My husband has had similar experiences where the normal amount of pain medication did not help in the least, and finally a dentist suggested he might have “The Ginger Gene.” My husband has dark brown-blackish hair and hair color doesn’t determine whether you have the gene or not. We looked it up and sure enough some people have this gene where anesthetics do not work as well on them. Sometimes you need more, and also other pain meds to get through procedures. They made a note on his chart and he hasn’t had problems since with that dentist. He also had problems with a colonoscopy. They kept having to give him more pain medication and he passed out from it. Usually a person stays awake during this procedure. He remembers as he passed out that he could still feel pain. Maybe look into this and bring literature with you next time you need to discuss pain management.
I'm terribly sorry! Also: are you having red hair or known to have any connective tissue disease? Because both are known to mess with anesthetic efficiency. I REALLY recommend you start looking into this now! Especially should you have hypermobility. Look up EDS! Even if it's not that, you can learn about how the processing of anesthetics can get affected. It can also be genetic disposition. You NEED to figure this out noe, because you really really do not want to ever have to have emergency surgery and for anesthesia to fail. Thus is you can figure out what is causing your bodies resistance, you'll be equipped to advocate for yourself with medical diagnostic paperwork and anesthesiologist will have an easier time deciding which anesthetics and form of anesthesia to use. You ABSOLUTELY want to talk to your anesthesiologist about this episode for any planned surgery in future! I had similar experiences but I wad lucky to insist on further numbing and they were worried and said "you're tiny and with that dosage I could put an elephant under" (figuratively speaking, of course). They were really stunned. I'm currently on the journey of figuring mine out. Also you should know that connective tissue disorders can actually mean that being hyper- and hypo-sensitive to anesthetics can be area related or even day-to-day related and must be approached step by step till it kicks in. It's just imposant they plan in the time after you explicitly telling them to please plan time cause you had issues before!
Lmao the way I would have taken the pain in my mouth over that... I'd have said "FUCK IT I WILL TAKE MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE, YOU'RE A HACK." and left... Like, listen to me or fk off (and I have had mouth pain from my teeth so bad I was vomiting due to it - so I do not say this lightly). I admire your strength is what I mean, since I PHYSICALLY could NOT have done that AT ALL... though I do feel you should not have had to and should not have put yourself through that, I also live in Canada and its a bit different where I live to many others around the world I guess... That is just awful, absolutely awful. Went through all that, could clearly see that you were feeling pain and just ignored you. Absolute monster of a dentist, that one!
Oh my goodness, thank you for this information! My dentist has always had to give me extra injections because one is never enough on me. I bet it is because of this, as my mother is a ginger. Luckily, he's kind and has never doubted me. However, he retired now, so I have to look for a new one, and I'll make sure to keep this in mind.
I'm so afraid of something like this happening to me and my loved ones. How are we supposed to trust and respect doctors when they don't trust and respect us?
It's so true that there's institutional sexism within the medical system that even feme doctors perpetuate. It's awesome to see you talking about these issues so openly and compassionately. I hope that these gaps will begin to close as more people become aware that they're present.
This is so true and frustrating. Especially women with ADHD. Most people don't know that 45% of women with ADHD also have PMDD, but it gets misdiagnosed as Bi Polar 2, way too frequently.
My sister LITERALLY is one of those women who got the misdiagnosis. Took YEARS to finally get the right of it with the physicals and she's been delayed in learning to deal with the MH issues she DOES have because of this stupid misdiagnosis.
To add to this, I was born in 1976. My mom was offered Phentermine to prevent “a lot of weight gain”… Not only was pain dismissed, but male doctors were concerned about a woman “getting fat”!!! She refused, btw.
I hate to defend the doctors, but back then, the 'ideal' bay was small enough to be born easily - and the more weight the mother gained, the larger the baby often was. Not an excuse, but that was the reasoning. I was fortunate to not have a dr that subscribed to that to the extent of prescribing drugs, but they did want me to keep my weight gain down. Not happening with my body, sorry. Of course, I would be a textbook example of WHY you should take those drugs - my babies were 10 and 11 pounds. I gained around 60 pounds with each of them - but 20+ of that was baby and fluid.
As a person with endometriosis, fEDS, osteoarthritis, and more, I am constantly angry at how badly we are treated. I’ve been lucky enough to finally find a GP who knows about pain; respects my descriptions of my pain; who has learned to trust me with problematic medications on the very rare occasions when I ask for them. Most women never get that kind of care and respect, and everyone should.
Can you make a video on tips for what women can do so they are more likely to get the care they need in current system? One tip I hear in America a lot is that, we should never mention words like anxious, stressed and other "negative feelings", or else we'll automatically be undertreated.
That's not a solution. In fact actually advocate for yourself. Aka ask questions like "how aware are you of sexistic biases in medicine?" and "I have the impression that this isn't working for me and I also have the impression you're not listening but stuck on some bias. I'll need you to be more specific on why you think this treatment plan is the way to go and I need you to stop for a moment and check yourself for biases. I'm not telling you that it doesn't feel right cause I WANT to be annoying. So, please tell me what it would take for you to listen and please check in with yourself if you'd make any adjustments if the person sitting before you was a man" Keep the tone completely calm but really directly address your concerns for bias. If they react badly to that then they're not on your team. A doctor on your team will stop and take your concern and need for further explanation of their treatment plan and diagnosis seriously.
Here's how to get better treatment. Be a white, wealthy male. You'll get all the treatment you could ever need at the drop of a hat. I know this because my white, wealthy cousins get seen and treated almost immediately, whereas I don't even get an appointment because I'm a woman.
reminds me of that time they canceled (or recalled? something major happened) male birth control because of all the side effects it was causing on the users. however female birth control, despite its side effects, is still pushed to be used
That's because of the way clinical trials work. A drug is deemed safe if the benefits of taking it outweigh the risks. For a woman, the physical risks of getting pregnant outweigh the risks of birth control side effects, so getting approval is easy. However, for men, there's no physical risk involved with their partner getting pregnant, so any side effects will automatically disqualify the drug because the risks (as the trial sees it) outweigh the benefits. In order for male birth control to be approved, the trial needs to look at the man's holistic needs and the needs of his partner, not just his physical health, which would be a big change from the way trials are currently conducted.
I've had severe pain in my left shoulder and arm for over 6 months now. I can't move my arm due to the pain, I can't sleep either. The reccomended treatment for this is stereoid shots into the affected area for pain relief. All I've gotten is "go se a physiotherapist" and "what do you want me to do about it?". I have literally never felt pain like this before and I have endomitriosis. I can't even get dressed due to the pain. But keep getting dismissed. They won't even try to figure out why I'm in such pain. All I have is paracetamol and that only takes the edge of it.
I had shoulder pain and numbness down my left arm which was caused by my endo. Struggled with it for years...after laproscopic excision for my endo it was better. There are a lot of nerves in your pelvis and referred pain does crazy things!
@clairejohnson9888 My left shoulder has had to deal with two rounds of shingles, a hit-and-run accident, and Lyme disease. It could really be anything at this point. It's not frozen shoulder nor arthritis, those have been ruled out. They're blaming it all on my ME. I also have hEDS, but they won't acknowledge it at all.
I had similar pain, from a pinched nerve in my neck, went to an ER and got nothing, told to take Aleve (acetaminophen does nothing for me if I have pain). No xrays, didn’t see a physician, finally had to consult my previous pain doc, who took an MRI and said I had a large bulging disc in my neck. I still take meds for nerve pain.
Did they check your rotator cuffs? I had sudden pain in my shoulder and arms and it was a torn cuff. If they haven't checked that, see if you can make them. I'm so sorry you have to be in such pain all the time. 😞
@cucamongaphilips I have suggested that and torn muscles and anything I could think of. But they've all been ruled out. I have a new physiotherapist, and she just said that asking a doctor to sign off on an MRI would be pointless. It should have been done months ago. She said that in a dejected tone mostly to herself. I agree. They should have done an MRI once the pain didn't subside. Physiotherapy is helping, just very slowly. Thank you. 🩷
I had a total hysterectomy and they sent me home THE SAME DAY after my surgery despite the fact I could barely walk. I kept calling afterward because something definitely didn’t feel right, and I kept being Rx’d useless anti nausea pills and being told it was “just the anesthesia wearing off.” Come to find out, I had a raging UTI from the Foley catheter that was in during surgery. Only took them 10 days later to get me on the correct antibiotic. 🤬
And this is one reason to demand that any provider document when they decline or refuse to run tests or prescribe medications with the reason why when 1) you know they'd do so for a man and/or 2) you request it and are denied. Yes, you may not always need that antibiotic, painkiller, or test, but forcing them to give a documented reason will leave a paper trail for anything ongoing or may make them reconsider if it's bias (or laziness or whatever).
OMFG this is EXCELLENT advice! At least it leaves something to go on if something really bad happens as result of their denials - you can work up a suit more easily. :)
@@bakaichigo I found this advice years ago, iirc, on either another YT channel or in an article about a woman whose chronic condition wasn't properly diagnosed for years because doctors wouldn't run certain tests. I've seen it advised several times since then in different places and always try to spread it, too.
I’m diagnosed with heart failure since three years, and medicated with a cocktail of five medicines and my cardiologist is pushing strongly for an ICD. Non-smoker, low blood preassure, don’t drink alcohol, BMI 21, walk 11-19 km/day at work, eat almost no meat. Initially, the doctors had the nerve to suggest panic disorder, one even said that my symptoms don’t exist, as one either has chest pains or not, and not only sometimes. Edit: oh, and I’m a woman.
Yikes, I got diagnosed with heart failure in Jan 2020...right b4 covid shtf...EF under 13% (pretty bad)...got the ICD installed (horror story, first one got infected, had to be removed, second implant on the right side because, lull in covid cases meant they needed to implant asap, before left side had healed fully, but, fun fun, couldn't install the 3rd lead so the left branch bundle block could be bypassed, allowing my left ventricle to *work again*, 4th surgery got it all complete, finally) and EF is now 25%...still bad, but livable! Best of luck to you, and praying too, you never know 🤣
"And not only sometimes" Those are some truly incompetent doctors, because they just completely ignored that TRANSIENT HEART issues do, infact, exist. Its a whole thing - there've even been huge medical drama shows on TV that used these types of heart conditions in their shows as PLOTS! Its easily found on google, even. I am so sorry you've had to deal with this! How scary D:
And heaven help you if you dare to be an overweight woman. I can't count how many times I went to the doctor for anything and was told to lose weight and I'd be fine. No, the multiple cysts on my uterus and ovaries couldn't possibly be the cause of my abdominal pain.
I know it's still not as bad as your situation, doctors will blame you for not doing enough AND ignore you- rather than jist ignore you, but thin women also get shooed out the door based only on their weight. I can't tell you how many doctors did not listen to a word I said, wrote in my chart "appeared healthy and alert", when my blood pressure was walking dead man low and I couldn't talk- my dad had to do all of the talking for me. I had a neurologist accuse me of wanting to have side effects, quote regarding a treatment my current neurologist says I cannot do; "there won't be any side effects. Unless you want to have side effects. Do you want to have side effects?" I would harass my primary every day for 10 years until he finally allowed me to see a cardiologist - after I had blacked out from a small cut and heatedly argued with him that my blood pressure was literally so low I could drop dead any second. The cardiologist had to be the one to put in the recommendation I get a new primary, one who specialized in women's health. The only time my weight worked in my favor was when I dropped 10lbs in 2 days, 30lbs over a two week period. I now have a very long list of disabling conditions - most could have been treated so they didn't become permanently disabling, or outright prevented. Even a female gynecologist, who said I couldn't possibly have endometriosis (I obviously did), because I was too young and it wasn't genetic (my mother had many surgeries for it, and research points to it very much being genetic).
Have you been tested for PCOS? I was told for years that even though I had ovarian cysts over and over that required surgical intervention that I didn't meet the criteria for polycystic ovarian syndrome because I was overweight and didn't have facial hair. Eventually found a doctor that did an exploratory surgery and confirmed that I did have PCOS but also endometriosis and pelvic inflammatory disease. Eventually at age thirty had a total hysterectomy. Had an ovary grow back and had to have another huge surgery and they found scar tissue had wrapped around my ureter, took thirteen hours. Now I don't trust any doctors and try to never go except for a check up
I truly empathize. My mother was over weight most of her adult life and had that same experience. We all know now that she had thyroid issues.😢 She nearly died twice because Doctors ignored her, once for appendex and then gal bladder, but eventually died because she had a huge Cancerous tumour in her gut. She knew something was wrong in her gut but no one would listen.
@@user-ix4sq7pf3c I do have PCOS. I've had the cysts drained once, and ended up having a hysterectomy a year ago because my insurance would rather pay for that than for the medicine to deal with the cysts.
Yep. Consistently told my joint pain was "psychosomatic", but when I took my dad with me cos we have the same symptoms we were finally diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome by a Rheumatologist then a geneticist. I had asked two different Rheumatologists if I could have EDS and the first one said "no, it's too rare, you're just fat" and the second one said "you're not in enough pain to have EDS". I genuinely wanted to slap that same guy because I was clinging on with my FINGERNAILS. He was the same guy who went on to diagnose my dad and me, and ofc he never apologised for minimizing my pain!! It was so messed up that I was almost GRATEFUL when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis too because you can't fake the blood tests and it was conclusive (and off the charts).
im glad im seeing more about EDS in media and stuff but the fact that its most visible/symptomatic in women is imo whats held back diagnosis so long for most people.
I was getting multiple symptoms which I saw as a red flag in terms of my period. I knew there was something wrong but my mother wouldn't allow me to see a doctor for multiple reasons including they'll just dismiss it and say it's normal. I did my own research and what I was experiencing seems to align with symptoms of endometriosis which was ironic considering the fact that I want to do a project on endometriosis and how medicine fails women. Recently I've found out that endometriosis is very common in my family (from both my mum and dad 's side of the family) I've been listening to my cousins stories of how the nhs has failed them. One got misdiagnosed with pcos and the later told "it's sorted itself out and gone away." She finally went to a private doctor and got diagnosed with stage four endometriosis. Had it been taken seriously earlier and caught in an earlier stage, she would not have suffered as much.
@@MsPeabody1231 if she was caught in an earlier stage, it may have been less painful. It's only been getting worse to the point it's entered state 4. My other cousin got diagnosed whilst having her appendix removed, she was in stage one then and she managed to quickly get treatment.
It was 5 months before I was finally diagnosed with diverticulitis. After another month of antibiotics failing I finally got sent to the hospital. My bowel perfed the following morning and when I begged my doctors for help I got laughed at. The hospitalist told me I was just anxious. The gastroenterologist told me I didn’t have a gi problem and to see a gynecologist. The pain was so bad that I couldn’t move. I sounded like I had hiccups because I was only able to take tiny breaths. I was dying and knew it and they left me like that for a day and a half. At one point I started praying to die faster so the pain would stop. I had no history of gynecological problems or anxiety yet those made more sense to my doctors instead of the diverticulitis they knew I had causing a perforation. It felt like I was being tortured and I am now terrified of doctors after that. I was begging for my life and my doctors left me dying.
It took 7 years for a Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome diagnosis and 4 years to get an endometriosis diagnosis. Also, my IUD insertion was so painful I had contractions and it caused an immediate CVS episode, first and last time (hopefully) that that's ever happened. It freaking sucks to be a woman sometimes.
Currently dealing with tailbone pain after falling down the stairs TWO YEARS AGO. Went to a pain management doctor over an hour away for him to ask "what did you expect us to do?" I said help my pain. He prescribed lidocaine patches that are out of stock everywhere. Still trying to figure out how to get one in between my butt cheeks, but since ill never get them, guess I don't have to worry about it. Too bad I have a desk job, right guys? The pain never leaves! 😅
Oh man I have the same problem. They never even checked my tailbone and I can tell it broke and healed extremely crooked, to one side. It hurts really bad to sit for long. .. So I often bring a discreet sitting pillow ( that's kinda less hard in the midde) to work and make up reasons to get up frequently .. because apparently asking for an xray or even a quick touch for disgnosis is too much to ask for. All the best!
@cognitivedissonance7422 yeah, the pillows aren't helping 😭 but I think that's what happened to me. And I've had x-rays, and a botched mri and they claimed to see nothing! But then where is the pain coming from, doc? 😫
I had tailbone pain for well over a year, even on really high doses of pain meds and it still didn't help! I eventually had a manipulation, where they move it back into position. That didn't help either, so I ended up needing a coccyxectomy where they removed the part that was out of place! I haven't had pain since then 😊
I suffered for 9 years because I was incorrectly diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, not the autoimmune disease that affcted my nervous system that I actually had. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at 13. It was actually pernicious anemia, and since the antidepressants did help with the panic attacks and some anxiety, doctors thought treatment wad working and anything I struggled with was just in my head. My antidepressants changed and the dose increased over the years. I dropped out of college and was a recluse for a few years. I finally did better after I walked to my woman PA and she did a b12 level labs, found I had intrinsic factor antibodies, diagnosed me with pernicious anemia, and prescribed b12 injections for life. Even then, she only gave me one mL every two months after the booster injections. In the UK, when someone has neuropathic symptoms and damaged nerves like me, 1 mL every single day is the norm. I buy B12 from Mexico since my doctor won't prescribe me more.
Shout out to the doctor I saw in the ER for extreme abdominal pain and abnormal bleeding. He admitted he wasn't qualified and referred me to a Women's emergency clinic nearby. I had a Ruptured Cyst with torsion and could have gone necrotic, if I was unlucky like many women before me I could have been told it was "just my period" and sent away into a forgotten corner and gotten dangerously worse and worse. Him believing me, admitting his inability to aid me and sending me somewhere that could, probably saved my life.
Having had 8 children, 5 with no medication, and gallbladder attacks (unrelated) I can tell you that birth isn't bad (until transition, when it's almost over) unless the hospital forces you into their protocol.
@@mansfieldfamily5389you aren’t everyone - consider yourself lucky that ‘it wasn’t that bad’ for YOU. You have to consider that not all babies are the same size, not all vulvas/vaginas/pelvic bones are the same size and I’m sure there are many countless other genetic and bodily traits that vary from person to person for some people to experience extreme pain from birth/periods etc. that some other women don’t experience. My mum would disagree with that from having me and being refused any pain relief during my birth - and I’ve heard so many other women talk about how difficult and painful their births were.
@@satyam168 that is correct. No epidural for five of the eight. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard or painful; it just wasn’t overall bad. It felt like immense and wonderful power. I was in awe with my body. While you’re in the middle of transition you wonder what you were thinking, but that passes so quickly. The induced births, on the other hand, made me want to die until I got an epidural. One epidural almost killed me, the other only worked for half my body. Pitocin feels like barbed wire squeezing your uterus. Then again i know a woman who got pitocin and didn’t need an epidural. Everyone is different, but birth is not torture, though some medical interventions can make it feel that way.
@@satyam168 I’ll bet she wasn’t allowed to move around during it. Being flat on your back while laboring is absolute hell. I have no judgment for those who choose epidurals. I just think more knowledge of the beauty and power of birth is worth sharing. Hospitals are great for emergencies, but their policies and protocols can make normal birth harder than it needs to be.
I tried an IUD for the first time 4 years ago. I was told it would be “just a pinch” and given Tylenol. I have severe PTSD now from that procedure. It was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever gone through. Contractions for over 8 hours and I was looked at like I was crazy. It was removed 3 weeks later. IUDs shouldn’t be done unless you’re knocked out. Especially for those of us who never have had kids nor want them. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of my own nightmare dealing with doctors
Same, got one. I didn't have contractions for 8 hours, but "just a pinch", my ASS. Then I had to walk home. Got it removed after 3 days because I could feel it all the time. Fuck IUDs.
It’s other conditions besides pain, too. I’ve had a seizure disorder since I was 2, but no neurologist has ever been able to diagnose what it is. If a seizure gets bad enough and becomes a grand mal, I go unconscious and my airway clamps down, so I have to be intubated in order to force air into my lungs. I bit off part of my tongue when I was 6 (just a little bit, luckily; it’s not obvious by looking at it) and have brain damage (Broca’s aphasia, which makes it hard for me to speak) from being deprived of oxygen for 10 minutes when I was 2. I went to a new neurologist a few years ago to get paperwork signed for college disability letters, and he did all the same tests that I’ve had before. As always, there was nothing that could give a conclusive diagnosis. Then, I mentioned that I have PTSD from some abuse that happened to me, and, suddenly, the neurologist lit up. He declared that I have a conversion disorder. I went home and looked it up. “Conversion disorder” is effectively the 21st-Century term for hysteria. The doctor decided that my seizures were all from stress being converted into neurological problems-problems that he said aren’t really there and would go away if I stopped being stressed. This man decided that my 2-year-old self just got too stressed and decided to seize, go unconscious, stop breathing for 10 minutes, and get permanent brain damage. I was so angry. I met another person with my same seizure symptoms, and she said the exact same thing: all the same tests, no real diagnosis, except she was never given the hysteria label. I guess she and I just have some unknown seizure condition.
Yes this! The pain scale is largely lacking IMO as a woman as well. I go to the hospital in pain with numbness and tingling in my back, they ask me "what's your pain level with ten being labor and delivery" my brain did a calibration and says "14" and they look at me like "no you would not be conscious" and it's like well then let's calibrate child birth down to a 6/7 🤷🏼♀️ The pain scale also doesn't seem to take into account that many of us women are so used to pain many days of the month that we have learned to sort of just smile and nod through a lot of pain rather than complain. Like before I ever go to the hospital for anything I need to be in bad state as I have extreme medical anxiety, before I've been to the hospital I'm throwing up, shaking severely, moaning, clammy, etc but I get to the hospital and I kind of disassociate in fear. These symptoms tend to stop (minus vomiting) and they don't want to treat it as pain. It's got to a point I just sign a DNR if I go in and have done so for nearly 20 years! It's freakin exhausting to literally be in pain EVERYDAY and to know that BC the Dr won't take it seriously that I am killing my liver and stomach lining with Tylenol and advil! My last GP diagnosed me with degenerative disc disease in L5 S1 and arthritis in my pelvis, hip and back. He did this through many tests and a CT scan where you could literally see the damage. He retired. My new doctor says "I don't see this in your chart. Your inflammation is off the charts but no arthritis. I'm not going back to your early 20s to look for a CT scan that was used for this diagnosis. Everyone your age (38 at the time) has some disc degeneration, it's normal!" Like ok Dr but it wasn't normal in 2000-2008 while my Dr was testing me for EVERYTHING trying to figure out my pain. 20 year olds don't have this stuff normally. Also be Dr doesn't care that my aunt has the spooning and such on her hands from rheumatoid arthritis, she tests negative for it but her scans have said otherwise since she was 14! I'm negative as well and my old Dr recognized that not everyone tests positive and you need to look at the scans! Then I get the whole "I wonder why your inflammation is so high, let's keep doing the same tests!" It's absurd and since I'm in Canada we have a Dr shortage where most ppl don't even have a family Dr in my town so I'm stuck with this dude who doesn't listen. It's a rural town. I have PTSD and am on disability for it. I shouldn't be going through an the same specialists who found nothing and being forced to travel 6 or more hours and needing Ativan etc all BC he doesn't trust scans he won't even look at... Some times I'm not in any pain (normally if I'm sick my normal pain stops) and other times I go through 400 extra strength Tylenol in a month BC I would rather die of liver failure than be writhing in pain 🤷🏼♀️ We need more doctors and those drs need to freakin listen.
@@resourcedragon I have disc degeneration and facet joint degeneration, diagnosed by an MRI when I was 41. I had experienced moderate to severe pain in my lower back for over 10 years by that point, and had begged for an MRI for most of that decade. It was only agreed when I saw a private physio (had already seen a lot of NHS physios, who said nothing was wrong, do some exercises, most of which were unsuitable as I also have Joint Hypermobility Syndrome/poss hEDS) who immediately suggested facet joint degeneration due to certain painful spots on my pelvis where the ligaments attach from the facet joint area. Luckily the GP I saw that time examined the same location, agreed with the suggestion, and referred me for MRI. I have been told the damage in my spine is normal for a 41 year old, but they failed to accept I had potentially had this for over 10 years. Rheumatoid Arthritis runs in my family, and I already have a lot of the comorbidities. I haven't been given anything to help with the pain, nor with the pain I experience with a whole smorgasbord of other chronic conditions, some of which are severe and have chronic pain as a main symptom. I haven't even been referred to a pain clinic, despite not being able to tolerate most medicine due to two of my illnesses causing sensitivity to medication, and a rare allergy to an ingredient that is in 90% of medicine (we don't have compounding pharmacies in the UK). Apparently I'm supposed to live my life housebound and in pain...
@@resourcedragon I was early 20s when diagnosed too! The new Dr won't look back BC there is so much in my chart BC my Dr was trying to figure out pain and my PTSD at the same time... My old Dr showed me the CT scans on the computer that are in my digital file, you could easily see the arthritis and disc degeneration! Even I could see the damage. He always did a great job of pulling the actual imaging and looking and explaining etc so it's been very disappointing to have a new, young Dr who "knows it all" but can't even pull up a DIGITAL file and the digital notes smh 🤷🏼♀️
@@resourcedragon oh and the CT scan tech told me when I got a follow up scan a year after diagnosis that it wasn't normal and that she was sorry I must be in horrible pain all the time BC it's common in elderly ppl whose nerves are more dulled and it's painful for them so it's got to be 10x worse for someone whose nerves are young. I have no clue on her science about the nerves but it makes sense to a degree BC they say not to use lots of products with elderly ppl as they may not feel things as easily, like heating pads!
They don't seem to realize that if someone with chronic pain passed out every time they felt it, they wouldn't be able to be talking to a doctor. They'd either be dead or effectively comatose.
❤❤❤...Dr...also bladder infections...years of misdiagnosis ramping up to serious kidney issues. It seems to me, female medical issues are a ready-made and forever guaranteed money maker for the medical industry (at least here in US). Thank you for the mention.
Saw 3 drs and went to the ER once over a course of 4 years before getting a dr to believe me when I told them I thought I had endometriosis. Finally got a dr who believed me and did a laparoscopy on me yesterday and diagnosed me with stage 1 endometriosis. I'm already seeing positive results even after just 1 day!
Thank you for addressing this issue. My sister in law had servere back pains for three years. Her doctor said it was imaginary. Then he tested her for bone cancer and three months later she was dead. My mother had severe pain an discharge which the doctor claimed was menopause. But she had cervix cancer. I was refused pain medication during delivery and forced to undergo internal exam during contractions. The list goes on and on. Glad to see this pointed out and i hope things are changing....
The craziest thing I've read is that, up until recently, the absorption of tampons was tested with SALINE instead of blood! They've only recently (like the last year or so) done the first proper trials using human blood. Insane.
You probably read that on a feminist article. Its not hard to use animal blood or fake the viscosity of human blood and its specific gravity. There are plenty of research in the subject going back decades.
@@doc_vader2776 If you spend ten seconds googling you can find tons of articles from many reputable sources (including non “feminist” ones) talking about this. Most menstrual products are still tested with saline, which leads to them absorbing less blood than they claim. I don’t know why you would deny this. Deranged ahh
@@doc_vader2776 this is not "muh feminism". Even period pad ads have been using blue-colored water with diluted gelatin instead of real period. Assuming you are a man, just because you are treated better by doctors doesn't mean others are treated that way.
@@RebelWvlf Jokes on you . I am a doctor. I like how you conveniently ignored the part where I said there is research on the topic going back decades. They test it on all sorts of fluids. Some body cherry-picked one where they used Normal Saline and wrote articles in some feminist magazines which spread like wildfire. I am a feminist myself. Got nothing against it.
I have an endometriosis diagnosis, and had 4 surgeries with specialists, my GPs still question my pain (women and men). There is no where left to go to get help pain- how is that ‘okay’? And me even suggesting I receive very little effective relief from painkillers is seen as ‘kooky’. Nvm the pain relief, if I got a nice buzz from pain killers (like my husband got off normal strength cocodamol after tendon reattachment) I think I’d definitely care less and cope with pain better. I had my whole peritoneal lining removed as there was more growth and scarring than good tissue, and wasn’t given anything different to my usual painkiller. I didn’t really think about how there may be biological differences to back this up. Dr Karan don’t make me cry. Also sign me up to any studies- please!
I have a chronic pain condition, AND at the time, also had endometreosis. I remember my GP giving me a copy of a report from a specialist that he'd referred me to (he always gives me the reports) a medical pain specialist - as in the medication aspect of treatment, rather than OT or Rheumatology/Orthopaedic etc. This complete numpty, who only saw me twice, felt qualified to say he thought "she over estimates her pain" after the 1st appt., and proceeded to mess with my pain management AND anti-depressants! 🤦🏻♀️ The second time I saw him him he was wearing a large wrist brace - I've never been so happy to see someone else in pain! His stupidity caused me 6 months of medical mayhem, and my GP would not send me back. I'll never forget what he wouldn't say to my face. I'll never forget his name either ... The fact that I 'prepare myself' for important appointments, rest up, do very little 2-3 days before (and can take up to a week to recover, depending on the distance travelled, wait time, and forced concentration of the appt,) did not occur to him, nor did he ask. He had zero concept of what it 'cost' to be, and remain, 'present' for the appointment, of the level of preparation and recovery ... I've had plenty of bad specialists in the last 40 odd years (of pain & life altering conditions) but that one stands out as one of the worst. "... overestimates her pain ..." wanna swap, you ar$e?!
what's baffling is that it is also often FEMALE providers who do the dismissing, gaslighting, abusing of their patients. it never stops shocking me when I go to gynecologists who cold hearted they are. they will find any weird random reason to make your situation your fault even when there is an actual pathology. frustrating.
It’s internalized misogyny and also training, I am a med student and I remember some doctors/professors sometimes throw in « women are dramatic » when talking about patients so sadly it’s even included in the training to not believe women when they describe their symptoms. It gives me the ick and I usually immediately lose respect for that doctor.
My friend got knee replacement surgery. She was in constant debilitating pain. She had to be in a wheelchair. Her orthopedist fired her as a patient. Fortunately, her family doctor believed her and found her a new orthopedist. He discovered the first one put the wrong size knee in, and she had to have the surgery all over again. It took a year for her to get the help she needed.
There are studies about pain medication on women, and it is studied how these work in women, e.g. Metabolism and pharmacokinetic/logical profile. The issue is, the number of samples is low, so that the outliers are often excluded. These outliers could be subgroup of people that respond differently, and could actually be significant number in the population, which however, is not observed due the small sample size.
I wish other doctors would acknowledge this. This is TRULY a massive issue in women's health! Thank you, Dr. Karan for this video and showing us some empathy!
My daughter has stage 4 endometriosis and the ER would send her home with extra strength Tylenol… SERIOUSLY!!!! Her pain was off the charts and this was the best they could do? We need to do better!! She finally had surgery, took 2+ hours and was found to be bleeding internally… Doing much better.
Ladies, we have to make sure doctors document any time they refuse treatment, and request the fuck out of painkillers or tests: whatever you think you need, insist, and if you can't get through, tell them to mark down that they are refusing to give it to you. That'll shape the docs up. They know you document things because you plan to sue them for malpractice if you have anything they could have prevented or helped with sooner had they listened.
bro i had severe UTI pain when i was 9 years old and my parents were told by a female doctor that i was faking it for attention until my UTI got so bad that i ended it up in the hospital and it took me so long to get better . like i went through all that pain and struggle just because a doctor was too lazy to do her freaking job like wtf ? and yes i think she did that to me because i am a female there are no other explanations really .
At that age, probably more because you were a child rather than a girl--doctors can be incredibly dismissive of children as well, saying that they're lying for attention or to get out of school (mild example, but I had a very bad sore throat at 14 that just wouldn't go away, and on week 2 I finally went to the doctor with my mother. The doctor *clearly* thought I was lying to get out of school or some shit, and was visibly surprised at how swollen my glands were when he actually palpated my neck 🙄. Turns out it was strep and I got some antibiotics)
Even if you were faking excruciating pain to get attention, it seems like that should be cause for concern. Like if I had a kid who felt they needed to do that to get attention, I'd be pretty interested in figuring out why they feel the need to do that and finding healthier ways for them to express that need.
Excellent!! I was treated like a psych case and denied an MRI despite being very specific about the degree and location of the pain I had in my head. For three years! No one would listen to me. They just wanted to put me on Prozac. I went to Mexico and paid for an MRI. Turns out, I had a brain tumor and 3-4 months (six on the outside) to live without intervention.
I was told my first migraine was “anxiety” and that my blurry vision was “just getting older” despite being 29 at the time 😐. I was also told my gallstones-which can be more painful than childbirth-were back spasms and to literally “walk it off.” Imagine being in excruciating pain and they just let you lie curled up in a ball on the couch for an hour and a half and then they dismiss it as “back spasms!” Talk about gaslighting!
With my fourth pregnancy, after 5 hours in the er, I was told to go home to wait for my labor to progress. I refused and demanded another doctor examine me. 14 minutes later, crowning in the elevator, I was being admonished for waiting so long to get to the hospital. Like I’ve never done this before.
I have dealt with severe pain in my upper right abdominal quadrant for about 6 years now. I was just diagnosed with hyperkinetic gallbladder and it needs to be removed. A woman surgeon diagnosed me. My male doctor told me it was psychological for years.
THANK YOU!! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 The only substances I know of that have been studied for gender differences are: 1. Metabolism of alcohol 2. Chemotherapy dosing because a person is dosed based on their body surface area (BSA) If there are any I missed, please let me know. I also had endometriosis and the pain was dismissed as “bad menstrual cramps.” Bad doesn’t begin to describe it. I almost passed out. I had a male OB/Gyn (he since lost his license) scrape my uterus for something he saw and that time I did pass out. No pain meds. Nothing.
You, sir, are amazing. I'm sitting here 11 days post-op from a total hysterectomy with a vertical abdominal approach, and I'm out of meds and left with take some Tylenol.
It took forever to find a med that actually touched my Endometriosis pain. I'm thankful for multiple female PAs who were mothers and took the time to help treat my pain. A lot of my pcp doctors are either women with endometriosis or women with children. I feel as though they understand the pain more. I do see male doctors for things that have been wonderful, but overall, I've had a great experience with PAs that are moms when it comes to treating pain.
As a woman who was only diagnosed with AuHD well into adulthood after several breakdowns and burnouts, thank you for bringing awareness to the discrepancy of women’s treatment in medicine. I mourn for the life I could have had if my struggles had been taken seriously but all we can do is push for change so that we can build a more equitable healthcare system.
I had a doctor tell me I must be depressed because I kept getting strep throat. I went to an ENT and cured my strep throat. And never returned to that first doctor.
Here’s a tip I heard. If a doctor tries to dismiss you, DEMAND TO GET IT IN WRITING. Majority of the time they’ll suddenly have an availability for you, or they can get in trouble.
This seems to be the most effective advice for dealing with any professional; always get it in writing. Any denial of medical procedures, being "fired", price changes for ongoing projects; if you have an ongoing or assumed contract with any professional, get these things in writing.
@@ShegrasiRegalis I've heard it as advice in a reddit thread for quitting jobs and ruining employers as lovely karma to those jerk bosses, but it works for EVERYTHING with legal issues: DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT.
Pain is trauma. These doctors who dismiss us, who hear us say "pain" and turn it into "discomfort" aren't just misdiagnosing us, they are leaving us in pain for years to decades (as in my case) and CAUSING Complex PTSD with their actions. But they will never admit it, they will never be held accountable because they will always be believed over a sick person, because in our society, now, illness is considered a character flaw. Illness is considered a deserved "result" of not following the magical "healthy diet and exercise" panacea that preventative medicine mutated into, and which people who are rarely ill (which is 99% of those who make it through medical training) like to credit their good health to, instead of the good genes, good childhood nutrition and luck that is the truth.
"In our society, now, illness is considered a character flaw. Illness is considered a deserved "result" of not following the magical "healthy diet and exercise" panacea that preventative medicine mutated into." 💯% This needs to be repeated, a lot. I think the reason it gained so much traction is that it works a treat for capitalism. "You're not feeling well?" "Rubbish. Get your lazy arse into work, or we'll find someone else to do your job." And then, of course, if you are unemployed, that's a character flaw, too.
Struggling with this rn, the way the dismissal messed with my mental health I’m just barely starting to understand. I worry the only way I’ll be diagnosed is through autopsy.
45 years of cardiac symptoms being written off as psychosomatic attention seeking only for a contrast CT - to show me how blocked up my coronary arteries were to push me to take statins, turns out my coronary arteries are pristine with only one having a calcium rating of 3 and anything under 100 isn't considered worth worrying about - to make an "incidental finding" of LVD. LVD being an aneurysm in your heart. And, now the doctors say they're not going to bother to do anything about it. Um, guys, I'd kinda like to be able to do stuff without all the cardiac symptoms
Lawsuit territory. That's medical malpractice. An aneurysm can rupture at any time, and you'd be dead before they could do anything about it. Make them say why they won't treat it, in writing, and sign it. See if that will make them change their minds. If not, request your records, and find a lawyer!
I will NEVER forget the pain I had after giving birth for my 2nd child. The cramps were so bad that I was bent in half crying. Delivery didn't hurt as much as afterwards. When I asked for something (the cramps triggered my fibromyalgia and my entire body decided to cramp in stupid areas like my back and neck) I was told that I wasn't really in pain. I just thought I was....yeah....no. It hurt. I hurt. Big owies and I needed help so they gave me overpriced Tylenol.
My personal favorite is: The reason ovarian cancer is so deadly is because, by the time they had symptoms, it's stage 4. Totally untrue. It should read, by the time the woman has finally made herself heard--it's too late. Ovarian cancer typically causes pain & cramping & rarely bleeding. If you have the misfortune of having a male gynecologist and you're still having a period, he will dismiss your concerns until you are mostly dead.
I think for starters you guys need to stop watching House M.D. and start trusting your patients: not everybody lies. Also, you don't have to pretend to be omniscient, you probably can say something like "I don't know what's wrong with you yet but we can get there by this and that...".
I had a patient who wasn't getting adequate pain management for 2 DAYS. And usually I have respect for male nurses, but sad to say she had male nurses for those 2 days. I get report, and the (male) night nurse tells me, "She's been on her call light all night to get repositioned and apparently was a handful yesterday as well." Well DUH! Nobody thought to increase the dose of her pain medication. I get a new order from the doctor and "suddenly" the patient is actually mobilizing and not ringing every hour for repositioning. And she was able to get discharged the next day 🤯🤯 Effective pain management for women...what a concept.
Dr. Karan, thank you for sharing this video! 😊 More awareness needs to be spread on this subject. It definitely feels as though women get the short end of the stick when it comes to getting diagnoses and finding out root issues to their ailments. I am one of those women. It took 21 long years to find out i had endometriosis. Not to mention 4 to 5 years to find out i have Sjogrens and Fibromyalgia. Have gone years and years with being gaslit by doctors, being told the pain is all in my head or not real, being told i am being dramatic about my pain or a hypochondriac. It's defeating dealing with any doctors in my area, I feel there are so many doctors around me that never get to the root of the medical issues, and they just throw medication at you instead of figuring out what is really going on. I always feel like I am on my own when it comes to dealing with my ailments and health issues.
Thank you very much for advocating for us, Dr. Karan, cause we're trying and it's still too often dismissed. 😢 Endometriosis patient here. I needed to consult a second surgeon cause the first didn't listen to what I needed or why. I'm neurodiverse. I struggled to even get this diagnosed. When he not just refused my treatment choice but also said no ones is gonna help me in that way, I had the so far worst day of my life (that's saying A LOT) and to this day I'm surprised I survived it (thanks, ADHD executive dysfunction, I guess?). I then had "good luck in the midst of bad luck". Randomly asked our local hospital. Kindest surgeon ever. We're in touch. I had complications n not only were they nothing against endometriosis, actually having a genuinely kind surgeon on my team made all the psychological difference! Wouldn't have made it through half as well even had the other one taken my case.
Yes, the famous, "children won't remember it". They do and they get PTSD. There was a study that showed that, no shit, Sherlock, if children are given pain relief after coronary surgery, _the survival rate improves._ It makes me very angry.
"Treat the pain they have, not the pain you think they should have."
Louder for the kids in the back! 💯
Sad that the "kids" are medical professionals in positions of power that ultimately decide if you live or die in the end.
@@noway377 This.
YES
As an ER doc: if I treated everyone for the level of pain they claim to have, half the bloody ER would be on i.v. opioids.
That said, some of the stories in this comment section make me question the sanity of some collegues. You wont leave our ER without an extensive blood workup, and if youre there for pretty much any amount of belly pain, you wont leave it without an ultrasound either. How are these people's tumors going undiagnosed for years? What's happening??? Is this an american thing?
more like say it louder for the old biased assh0l3s.
I still can't fathom, If someone says they are in pain why the bloody hell would you call it hysteria.
Sexism
Because men's health was more prioritized over women's.
It’s other conditions besides pain, too. I’ve had a seizure disorder since I was 2, but no neurologist has ever been able to diagnose what it is. If a seizure gets bad enough and becomes a grand mal, I go unconscious and my airway clamps down, so I have to be intubated in order to force air into my lungs. I bit off part of my tongue when I was 6 and have brain damage from being deprived of oxygen for 10 minutes when I was 2.
I went to a new neurologist a few years ago to get paperwork signed for college disability letters, and he did all the same tests that I’ve had before. As always, there was nothing that could give a conclusive diagnosis. Then, I mentioned that I have PTSD from some abuse that happened to me, and, suddenly, the neurologist lit up. He declared that I have a conversion disorder.
I went home and looked it up. “Conversion disorder” is effectively the 21st-Century term for hysteria. The doctor decided that my seizures were all from stress being converted into neurological problems-problems that he said aren’t really there and would go away if I stopped being stressed. This man decided that my 2-year-old self just got too stressed and decided to seize, go unconscious, stop breathing for 10 minutes, and get permanent brain damage. I was so angry.
I met another person with my same seizure symptoms, and she said the exact same thing: all the same tests, no real diagnosis, except she was never given the hysteria label. I guess she and I just have some unknown seizure condition.
@@eternallife8898for humans it was also a term used to describe emotional instability and tendency for mood swings mainly in women
@@eternallife8898No, they literally thought the womb moved throughout the woman's body, causing emotional stress. That's how primitive gynecology was.
What sucks is that a lot of women's issues are dismissed as anxiety.
or hypochondria!
It’s even worse when you truly have those conditions and then, for real, have something wrong! They see anxiety and hypochondria in your chart and don’t believe a word you’re telling them. (And then it turns out you have gallstones and you weren’t making things up after all! Shocking!)
@@stephgreen3070 Ugh. That seems awful
I see news articles about 30 year old women going through shit most men experience at the age of 15. Shut up and get over it.
Or THYROID
I love when male doctor tells me I am exaggerating my pain symptoms caused by organs he doesn't have and therefore can't imagine the pain ...
Yes! And yet they complain to us about not being able to understand the sensitivity of their "man land"!
@@mynameisworldomg I wish I could give this comment a 'like' 1000 times over!
Women should know their place .
@@doctorpanigrahi9975 yes, women should know their place as not lesser than men. Thank you for this inspiring message
I had an amniocentesis (using an ultrasound to guide the needle, a procedure used to take out a small sample of the amniotic fluid surrounding a baby for testing), and my male doctor told me it would not hurt, and would just be a bit uncomfortable. I was surprised because it hurt very, very badly. I must have whimpered because he looked surprised and asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he looked at me with disbelief and repeated “it’s not supposed to hurt at all.” Doesn’t feel very good to not be believed. If you look up the statistics, there is a wide range of pain and non-pain reactions amongst women for this procedure. For some women, it most definitely hurts.
“Pain is what the patient says it is” something I was taught in nursing school and that I have always worked by.
Thank you for that 🙏
that's a very common sense approach!
@@antine1279 you would think 🤔
Guess who has never had a drug seeking patient?
:)
@@kevincaruthers5412 “nursing school” - nurses don’t prescribe major painkillers or controlled drugs, so your drug seeking patient is not so interested in them (even though their pain is still real - just has a different cause) But other patients can benefit from the empathetic approach that validates their experience. The brain will continue to increase the experience of pain until it feels it has been taken notice of.
Let's not forget about ASD and ADHD that has been tragically underdiagnosed in woman for decades
I'm autistic and finally got diagnosed at 42! I was diagnosed ADHD at 18, after my family did our OWN research to prove it.
I am desperately trying to undo all the psychological damage that was ingrained into me from the time I was a child - it's unbelievably hard.
Highly recommend Mom on the Spectrum here on YT - Her videos have really helped me!
@@kateshiningdeer3334 I'm a male diagnosed with ADHD at 40 and my psychological situation is a catastrophe too. Thank you for the channel recommendation, I'll look into it and good luck with your life and therapy
I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until my 30s, and I'm still struggling to get my autism diagnosis at 45. I've been told they won't prescribe effective ADHD meds to me because I wasn't diagnosed before the age of 12. They didn't think little girls in the 1980s could have ADHD, even when I was sent to a specialist because of how disruptive I was in class. 🤔
@@andreacook7431 They won't prescribe you the medications? Which country does that?
I'm 37 & working on a dx now
My mom had abdominal pain for several years. She KNEW something was wrong but was ignored. She had colon cancer 😢 it killed her because they didnt even test her until she refused to leave the office 4yrs AFTER the pain started.
That's horrible! I'm so sorry.
This is so heartbreaking. So sorry for your loss. We all know our bodies best, especially when something is wrong.
It was a similar story with my maternal grandmother nearly 50 years ago. It didn't help that she had a bit of a Thing about bowel movements and regularity and so she regularly took a lot more laxatives than she should have. This may have masked symptoms and/or made doctors think that the problem was due to laxative overuse, rather than otherwise.
Again, by the time she actually go a diagnosis, it was too late to deal with the cancer, especially in those days when treatment options were more limited than they are now.
Absolutely Tragic. You have my sincere condolences. The whole system can be innately corrupt in many instances. But even if those instances are not the majority (which they are, but even after giving the benefit of the doubt) the entire system should be reworked.
I've had issues that thankfully didn't get that bad before I was able to put my foot down. Collectively, as women, we need to start just refusing to leave until we're given at minimum a referral for testing. I always forced administrators to do their jobs by finding their offices and refusing to leave until they sent the stupid email I needed, why should doctors get more respect? Every fool in the world has to be forced to do the bare minimum but if you need it and you know they can do it, force them! Don't fight or anything, but just refuse to leave without something to go forward with. Being firm can be hard, especially if you're used to being mild mannered or people pushing you around. It can help to think about how you would feel if someone was treating your child this way, your mom this way, etc. How angry you would be, how you'd push them and never take no for an answer. Your life and your health is just as important as everyone else you love, so take up so much space that the doctor's preconceived notions don't fit into the room anymore.
Nothing got me to treatment except making it more inconvenient to dismiss my issues than to "humor me" by giving a referral to a test. Let them think I have a mental disorder! As long as I get my scan/blood test/whatever I don't care, because when my results come back showing something is wrong, I'll have data to bring to a new doctor who might take me seriously this time.
My friend’s sister went to hospital with delirious pain. Hospital kept sending her home even though it was prolonged and told her it was the flu and to take some paracetamol. She was dead two days later from undiagnosed meningococcal. Women are expected to get on with it as if their pain is natural or accepted as as fact of life.
Please tell me that became a medical malpractice lawsuit! That is unconscionable!
That's horrible :( I'm so sorry and may your sister's friend rest in peace. ♥
Well its time to sue the hospital as that is considered negligence correct?
My condolences to you and I hope your sister may rest without pain.
Did you file a suit for medical malpractice/negligence? Surely that is in complete violation of the Hippocratic oath, among numerous other laws?!
i have to make a counterpoint here, same thing happened to my neighbour and a farmer i know
doctors can be arrogant but in this case it is not sex related
My friend's behavior got really erratic in her late 40's and she went to the doctor saying she felt something was wrong with her brain. Rather than doing any tests, he diagnosed with bipolar disorder, even though she never she had never shown any signs of it before. Things continued to get deteriorate, and after an incident she was admitted to the hospital where they found she actually had melanoma that had spread into her brain. It was stage four by that time and there was little they could do. She died and left behind two kids.
That is horrifying. My condolences to her family and to you.
Oh good lord I am so sorry, that took the fucking breath out of my lungs for a minute. A living fucking nightmare, I hope you have some form of legal recourse
How could that doctor even diagnose her with bipolar disorder when that's something for extensive testing with a _psychologist_ to handle?! That is so rage inducing. I am so sorry for your loss...
Men in medicine.
Disgusting. I'm so sorry that happened. I cannot imagine how her children will feel when they get older and realize how the medical system treated their mom in the worst way possible.
I just remembered that news story about how someone was stealing the injectable pain medication from a women's health clinic, replacing it with saline. They got away with doing this *for YEARS* because nobody believed the patients when they said that the pain meds didn't work.
Was that a nurse who was stealing fentanyl? I read about something similar
There's a great podcast about this called "The Retrievals"
I read of a nurse stealing drugs and using TAP WATER to replace with and the patients got horrible infections. NOW let's have the conversation about how badly women in healthcare treat other women. NOPE, they sure don't have our backs.
What shocks me is that many of those medical people were WOMEN. WOMEN refusing to believe other women. So much for the sister.
I just know that there was one nurse who was mentioning to everyone that this isn't normal, that something was wrong with the meds, and being ignored that whole time.
@@vociferonheraldofthewinter2284 It’s their modus operandi. There have to be LEGIONS of complaining patients before they take action. What ever happened to erring on the side of caution??? AND I totally agree about our false motion that women care MORE. They are trained to be just like men in medicine. Callous, indifferent, self/concerned.
This is why, as a disabled woman, I now bring my spouse to all appointments and procedures. I didn't get most of my diagnoses until AFTER I got married, even though I had been dealing with symptoms from them all since my teens!
Girl this same shit happened to me. It's unbelievable how much better the medical treatment is when a man is there to back you up. If I say I wake up in pain 5-8x a night I'm exaggerating, if my husband says "she wakes up 5-8x a night crying in pain" suddenly its real.
@@Meskarune Exactly! My partner could repeat me verbatim right there something I JUST said, and its like, oh he said it so it MUST be credible
I just got married and didn't know about this extra "perk" - I'm for sure going to do this when I really need to be heard. Sad it's necessary but good to know 🙏
That's terrible
:(
Seriously, I knew a guy that got a vasectomy that took 15 minutes and was given the best pain meds. Meanwhile, a friend of mine had horrible pain from a broken arm in 4 places and it was a mission to get meds that could help her. It turned out they had set the bones incorrectly so she had to go over the whole thing again. I just couldn't believe the difference of ease between the 2. It still blows my mind
That's insane..is this misogyny?
I, a woman, have had 3 surgeries, 1 serious procedure and have been diagnosed with two conditions which can cause a lot of pain. I was told to take an obscene amount of Tylenol and Advil to help with the pain--those things don't touch my pain. I have a close man friend who had pain at work and I drove him to the hospital. They treated him with IV pain meds, took him seriously when he said he had pain and where and, despite blood work and scans, found nothing wrong. They chalked it up to a maybe perhaps could be kidney stone and discharged him with a prescription for Norco, told him to drink beer and wrote him an excuse for work. It was like being in two different worlds. I had been in that exact hospital two months earlier and was treated like crap and a liar. Amusing twist, I picked up his meds and his beer. He told me to take those Norco home with me because "I don't take those things and hell, this doesn't even hurt that bad." I don't have words for this insanity. My health issues are visible under scope and via blood work and I get made to feel like a liar.
I've had three surgeries in my life, and the third one was the most minor of them, but when I woke up, I was in extreme pain, like 10 out of 10 pain. It took two hours to get pain meds, which helped tremendously... and which makes me wonder if I was not given any pain treatment at all during the surgery.
The prescription for pain meds ran out before I recovered, and I needed to get my _other_ doctor to prescribe enough for two weeks.
@@helendancelot no just shi*ty doctors
@@helendancelot It is hard to say for specific cases, but the trend of women getting worse treatment absolutely is one based in sexism.
Sometimes it is sexism from old practices, such as misdiagnosing specific women's conditions, such as endometriosis often getting overlooked. You don't need to be sexist for that, just to have been taught how to do medicine by a system that is sexist.
There is also the more personal kind of sexism, when doctors treat women as lesser. Acting as if they are hysterical, making shit up, and acting as if the doctor knows their own symptoms better than they do.
Yeah I regularly have chest pain caused by muscle spasms. It's automatically assumed it's just "Anxiety".
They never actually got rid of hysteria. They just call it anxiety now.
SO FUCKING TRUE!!!
@@jbach1738 Of course then they turn around and don't take actual anxiety seriously either. "It's not that bad" "Just calm down" "Stop being dramatic". Etc.
So it it a bad enough condition to cause symptoms of excruciating pain or not?
The answer with this and many other things is "Whatever will let them blow off a marginalized patient."
So true!
Yeah the anxiety I was told I had turned out to be a perforated bowel. They damn near killed me
The fact that I have anxiety and went untreated for a long time because I thought I was paranoid, and a old male doctor suspected about my condition, and gave me anxiety medication so now I'm feeling better....
Yeah, it took 10 YEARS or more (11 or 12), and even thou my own MOTHER noticed something wrong but didn't sent me to doctor till I was heavily depressed and isolated....😢😢😢😢
I, a woman, have been profoundly failed by medicine again and again.
As a slim 21-year-old, I had edema in my legs and excruciating pain in one foot that would be bad enough to cripple me.
It only took 30+ years to be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. Just 30.
It’s a disease of young age , more common in female , if you had ever presented with joint pain this would be the first d/d . on the otherhand osteoarthritis is a different entity , it’s a disease common in older people .
Sorry to hear :(
My mom got lucky and was diagnosed within about a year, but they didn't give her any pain medications that didn't cause problems with the arthritis medication.
My mom was so lucky that I could teach her a bit about researching online so she figured out which foods trigger reactions. She keeps up with the medication of course, but flare ups only happen if she overworks herself and she has pain medication that helps.
The doctors said food has no effect, I suspect most arthritis studies with food have only been done on gout so the other forms are ignored since they're not caused quite as much by food.
@@muhtasimfuad1945I’m aware of the facts about ra and oa. I’m the person who’s lived with them.
@@muhtasimfuad1945I did, in fact, have the joint pain with the edema -at 21 years of age-.
I didn’t get any medical help with the pain or inflammation (which had never gone away) until I was 53.
My mom was in severe pain for months, the doctor said her crohns was flaring up due to a virus. Finally she demanded an MRI and she had a giant tumor on her pancreas. Stage 4 cancer, she died 6 weeks later. I will never forgive the way she was dismissed when she knew something was terribly wrong.
I'm so sorry for you. That doctor sounds awful.
My hugs to you. That's awful.
I'm so sorry for your loss..
Sue the doctor for misdiagnosis..
The whole world should know about this..
That is terrible.
I'm so sorry.
🤯😢
I changed 3 gynecologists by now because all of them refuse to test me for endometriosis which I am highly suspicious of due to extremely crippling cramps and painful bowel movement. I was told how I am "just hysterical" and "need to take anti-anxiety meds". If cis men could get periods, medicine would improve thousand-fold.
My mom's breast cancer was dismissed as "the pain is all in the head", until my dad was yelling at the doctors to check her on mammograph. The cancer was diagnosed way too late and she died back in 2020. I am so angry as I am typing this, our Serbian healthcare system is consisting of murderers and butchers.
💔
They all should be charged and jailed for 'murder by medical negligence'
They will get theirs but sometimes we aren't witnesses to that. It's a leap of faith and good people doing good is what counts. Get out and spread the word, help to reform a broken system, set up foundations in your mom's name to aid in better healthcare for women and to honor your mother. There are things you can do to show you're not broken.
@@NinjanimegamerI don’t know what la la la land you are living in - no doubt live in the USA! Do you think the average person in Serbia - especially dealing with pain and long term health issues in the family has the money, time or energy to ‘start a foundation’ or get the system changed….
God all these dismissive answers just make me think "even if that is true, is that not still a problem?" like, if anxiety causes IBS, there are medicines you can take for IBS. If you have psychosymatic pain, it is still fucking painful and should be treated, not dismissed as being all in the head. 😢
Dr. Karan, with social media and other outlets, showing frequently how healthcare for women is very different from men, and also showing there is a real need to understand women’s bodies and health, is there more being done to correct this? Are there studies and research happening currently?
No. There’s no money in helping people. Just treating the symptoms like he said.
Yes but long way to still go
@@DrKaranThanks very much 🙏
@@parikalanyantra69
Nice profile picture, troll..
@@raraavis7782 report as cornography
What a crazy idea, testing women for women's issues! It's ludicrous that in this day and age this hasn't been remedied 🤬
might have to do with the men thinking they’re women and demanding getting treated medically as if they’re women
Ok, not very well-versed in issue, but can't it be that nowadays there are less female volunteers than male ones? Like, how they gonna test someone, if subject is unwilling? Not saying it's a whole issue, but maybe it's part of it.
Well, unfortunately, women's health wasn't taken seriously till the 80's/ 90s, so they are very far behind.
@@missjo2036 they? WE are far behind. As in, *we, the society.*
@@kakhakheviashvili6365this definitely is part of the problem. Men are much more likely to take risks, like a new drug or trying different dosages to see how it goes. A clinical trial with women is a lot more difficult to do.
My sister had her tubes tied, and the idiot doctor told her it wasn't a big deal, minimal pain, scheduled it for her lunch hour, and told her she could go straight back to work after (she works for the telephone company, in the buildings where all the wires are, and she's constantly climbing up and down ladders to check circuits, etc. Or something like that. I'm not going to pretend I understand electricity).
After the surgery, she had to call her husband to come pick her up because she was having horrible cramps and bleeding like a really bad period.
She was out of work for 2 days (prolly only because the surgery was on a Wednesday, and it wasn't her weekend to work).
Just two days? 😮 i thought you are out two weeks after that kind of surgery
@@SaheeliRaino heavy lifting for 2 weeks after, which wasn't too much of an issue (the guys she worked with moved/carried any spools of wire she needed).
And only Tylenol or motrin for pain. Effing dingus doctors.
@@RamenNoodle1985 What? It's one month of no heavy lifting here! None at all for 2 weeks and then you can start lifting light things in week 3 and slowly increase weight 😧
@@KxNOxUTA yeah, after watching what happened to her, I've made sure I only have woman doctors, and even then, pap smears suck cause my doctor's clinic only carries 1 size, and it's too big and hurts like crazy.
What a screw up dr
Complete screw up
Malpractice for sure
For 5 years Dr's kept saying my abdominal pain, problems peeing and having bowel movements, weight loss and severely heavy periods were anxiety and an eating disorder. I had a fucking tumor. They thought my weightloss was more likely me starving myself despite me constantly telling them I eat a lot. My stomach issues were a "nervous stomach" and pain was a normal part of being a woman and I should stop exaggerating. I'm still bitter. I didn't get diagnosed until I almost died from blood loss and starvation. The tumor was in my uterus and it was pressing on my bladder and intestines.
Imagine if being a woman was actually naturally as painful as they think. At that point I'm pretty sure natural selection would've selected women out of existence and men would just start asexually reproducing lol because there is no way an existence that is literal constant pain for half the population would last under selective pressures.
I had a fibroid in my uterine wall that made me retain urine
That was horrid
Size of a grapefruit
@@YeshuaKingMessiah Yeaaaah, that causes bladder infections and pain >_< I well know. I wish doctors took women's abdominal pain more seriously.
Hope you're feeling better now!
I'm sorry that happened to you. Very glad you got it figured out.
My dad has been admitted anytime he’s shown up. For any random bs. My mom was sent home thrice from the hospital with pneumonia, told it was “just a chest cold stop being paranoid” and to keep working. Finally the 4th visit they said they were surprised she was alive and hadn’t collapsed or died in her sleep from sheer fatigue, her oxygen levels were incredibly low and she had pneumonia (PNEUMONIA NOT WALKING PNEUMONIA) for three plus months.
That exact same thing happened to me when I had pneumonia. I was 27 years old, 5'6" and dropped all the way down to 100 pounds. The nurse listened to my lungs and said my "soft breathing" was very concerning, along with the weight loss, and my overall weakness. It took me 20 minutes to walk from my car to the emergency room even though I was parked right in front. I could barely move from weakness and exhaustion and the ER doc poked his head in and said "she just needs to go home and rest, it's probably just a virus." I'm lucky my mom flew into town and found a doctor who would take me seriously. When he saw my chest x-ray he said "you should be in the hospital. How did the ER miss this?!?" Also, that useless ER visit ended up costing me almost $3000.00. I was charged $250 at the time for the visit, then later a bill for $600ish for the "doctor consult" and another bill of $2000 for the ER came in the mail. I'm 43 now and still get angry when I think about that damn ER visit.
This kind of thing happens to both men and women. Also, men tend to be very slow to address health problems so by the time they go to the doctor, they are in bad shape. This isn't a simple "doctors hate women" issue
@@NadiaSeesIt Read more comments. Trust me, it gets worse.
My wife was victim to dr's dismissal of women's pain for years. Her gp routinely ignored her back pain for years. It wasn't until she told her Dr that I thought the pain was serious that he sent her for a ct scan. The scan showed all kinds of damage to her spine. She's had a very similar response when she attended the pain clinic. 🤬🤬
And, dare I say it, my gut feeling is that pain clinics are largely bullshit. From what I've seen they seem to work on the premise that pain can be dealt with by meditation or giving yourself a good talking to, or things of that sort.
I was told with abdominal pain (severe) and unable to eat or drink that it was in my head. They would admit me, put me on tpn, discharge me and say I was fine. Went on for months. Finally a doctor tested my gallbladder. It was not functioning I was then told "Well your pain isn't as bad as we would normally expect, so we are going to discharge you and see how you are in a month."
I was admitted again severely dehydrated and in pain in less than 8 hours. They refused to give me pain meds waiting 36 hours for the surgery.
I was told after words that my gallbladder had been 100% blocked in the bile duct by gallstones, and they were sorry they didn't do anything sooner. The surgeon who came in post op asked why they hadn’t taken the Tylenol they had prescribed pre surgery for pain, and I told him I hadn't been able to keep anything down. Fun times.
That should be illegal! That's so horrid I'm sorry :(
Tylenol?! FFS 🤦🏻♀️ So sorry you had to experience such torture, that is negligence.
Ugh, I had to have my gallbladder removed too, due to a blocked duct. It was the worst.
That's terrible! I had an acute gallbladder (gangrenous) and they gave me Fentanyl x1, something for the nausea, antibiotics and morphine every 4 hours until my surgery. When I was still having pain between morphine doese, they offered me an NSAID as well, but I opted for an ice pack.
*That's* how it should be handled.
@lauraelliott6909 First, I'm glad you got it dealt with and are better. Second, yeah, that sounds like they managed it, really well. I think it was at least part of that hospital, though. I was left in a waiting room for 6 hours with compartment syndrome (i was bleeding into my leg, and couldn'tstand. , then told I wasn't getting anything for the pain and that there was nothing wrong (calf purple, hard as a rock, and the size of a cantaloupe. That I could deal with the throwing up. (I was, but from pain). Said he was discharging me. And my mom made the PA get a doc, but that took 4 hours only for him To be horrified that no one had mentioned my leg to him, (he came in when they found out I needed blood), and was shocked no one gave me pain meds (gave me dilaudid) and got me rushed to surgery. (After I was told I had been 20 minutes from an amputation, and should have been in surgery hours earlier, and had I left, I would have lost the leg. And probably would have gone into septic shock and died)
Another time they said ovarian torsion wasn't causing me any pain. That it was just some pain from the cyst and to go home and take Tylenol (no test to even see if there was an issue until I demanded a new doc.) Then was again rushed to surgery.
And it's even worse when we're red-headed. I recently had remediation surgery at a plastic surgeon's office under local anesthetic. I was terrified because every time I've had stitches in the past, the doctor wouldn't believe I COULD FEEL the stitches going in - they said I was just scared and "it's okay". So when I reminded the nurses at the plastic surgeon that I will need MORE anesthetic than most folks, they were doubtful. Once they started, they were amazed at the number of shots they had to give me before I could no longer feel anything....... Then they left me sitting in the room for a half hour before starting! Needless to say, they had to stop periodically to give me more shots in specific places where the anesthetic either wore off, or never reached the right spot.
The trauma of going through that kind of thing over and over and over again, of never being trusted because I'm a woman, of being labeled a drug seeker when I warn they will need to give me more because I metabolize it differently than everyone else... yeah, that wears on a person and destroys trust in the medical community.
Ah! Me getting minor surgery: am given one dose of local. Asked, "Can you still feel that?" Answer, "Yes."
Given second dose of local. Asked, "Can you still feel that?" Answer, "Yes."
Doctor looks at use-by date on the bottle (sees it's not expired). Usually says, "Well I *_can't_* give you any more," other than the most recent doctor who said, "Well, I can't give you any more, you've already had the elephant dose."
I'm not red headed (and don't have the genes for red hair) but there are a lot of situations where local just doesn't cut it for me.
Yeah, I often barely respond to local anesthesia too. Not sure how many red-head genes I have (just a hint probably) but it's also known to be correlated to neurodivergence.
Had several bad experiences but the cake goes to the dental surgeon who complained that he "couldn't work like this" when I was crying on the table cause it hurt so much but he ASSURED me it was only pressure that I felt. That man can go rot in hell for eternity if it's up to me. Basically removing one of my molars without any (effective) anesthesia and daring to complain.
@@resourcedragon
I mean that’s fair though. If they’re concerned it could kill your.
@@DanielledeVreede Read your comment out loud to my husband. So sorry this happened to you. Thank you for educating us about the neurodivergence aspect. My husband finally had a dental procedure where the dentist told him he probably had the Ginger Gene. My husband has dark brown-blackish hair but has been suffering with different procedures for years. They gave him so much meds during his colonoscopy that he passed out and still could feel the pain as he did. We’ll look into the neurodivergent aspect which does apply to him. Thanks!
I have that too. I had to have one of my teeth drilled with (to me) no anesthesia, because they decided they couldn't give me any more.
My current dentist has it written in big letters in my chart that I need a double dose, and I still remind them every time. I'm glad they look at all the work I've had and figure I probably know what I'm talking about.
I had a kidney stone in my right ureter that I was told by a hospital ER doctor was small enough to pass on its own. Six months and 4 attacks of excrutiating pain later, it was finally recommended that I see a uroligist. She had me in for surgical removal two days later because the stone hadn't move one centimeter in all that time and was firmly stuck in the wall of my ureter. My right kidney was distended from not being able to empty properly and she had to insert a stent in my ureter to keep it open long enough for the injury caused by having to extract the stone to heal. The few men that I've known who had kidney stones all received shock wave lithotripsy to break them up on their first visit to the ER.
Bruh i didnt even know there was a treatmeny for that
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the size of your kidney stone fell into the category of “send patient home and allow to pass naturally” because the study the guidance came from was all male patients that have larger ureters. So much science and medical guidance is based on only male physiology.
My dad didn’t receive anything but pain meds. It was apparently small enough to pass but still took a week or two.
I was misdiagnosed 4 times over a 6 month period, all the time becoming more and more disabled. I went from hiking 40 miles a day to the point where I could barely move, and it still took 2 weeks to order a blood test. After being told repeatedly all I had to do was physiotherapy and it was my fault for not doing it enough, or not doing right, when I physically couldn't. turned out I had osteoporosis and had fractures all over my body. Now trying to get back to physical fitness, the whole ordeal has been a nightmare. I can't know if I'd have been treated any differently if I'd been a man, but I sure wasn't taken seriously as a women.
osteoporosis is diagnosed when you get broken bone, not by feeling bad or weak, this is how NHS procedures works for everyone, not only women.
@@KlaudiuszegBut if you don't know you HAVE fractures, how would you even get that tested for? This whole case is insane. Someone should have at least LOOKED to see what was going on!
X-rays are so easy to make these days
@@Klaudiuszeg Could have broken a bone when hiking. Women's pain are not always felt. Some people's periods feel worse than broken bones..
My PT doesn’t even give me exercises lol
My body is just wrecked
Pinched nerves
My life is ruined, can’t work, barely do my ADLs, always in pain unless I lay flat
Ppl w/o pain don’t get it
I’m in crushing poverty now
It frustrates me that even some women will put other women down. I was having lunch with co-workers and shared a few bad experiencs I had at a GP and hospital which inevitably landed me in emergency somewhere else because none of the medical practitioners cared to listen to me earlier.
When I told my story, the response I got was, 'well you know your body better than anybody else so you needed to take initiative'
....
Jeez, I wonder what medical professionals are here for? Maybe I should've done my own ultrasound at home and ripped open my abdomen with a steak knife! Becase that was all that was left! :D
How unwomanly of me.
Their reaction is a reaction to reality in which we indeed can not really on professionals sometimes, tragically so.
However it is completely valid that you should have had compassion first. What they did, was attending by the "fix" method, rather than actually attending to your emotions by "listening and validating" method.
It's a common problem. Ppl want to help in situations they feel helpless in BECAUSE they care.
I hope you can feel safe enough with your friends to actually bring this up. And to openly tell them what you had hoped to receive instead. Because unfortunately that, too, is not something we can depend on friends on. They're typically not taught to attend to emotions sufficiently and take them seriously, due to still the very same sexism.
Thank you for speaking up here. This IS a very valid issue. It hurts when you've been mistreated and we're already in a vulnerable position but then still are burdened with having to advocate for yourself and even teach ppl how to help. It's the WORST time to expect ppl to be self-reliant and strong. 😢 It shouldn't be that way and you should have had proper support by the medical professionals and your friends + the hurdle for advocating for yourself should really be "This doesn't seem to work for me, are there any options we're not considering/unilising yet?" and that to be followed by grace.
Yeah that speaks VOLUMES to the sorry, sad state of female healthcare where you live and in general... That we, as a rule CANNOT rely on just one doctors opinion, that women have to SCREAM and FIGHT just to be heard and if you do anything less its seen as "not advocating properly for yourself" is a sign. A big, brightly glowing neon sign. And the sign is not saying anything good...
I'm so sorry you had to encounter that; they should have reacted first with compassion to your struggles and offered their advice as proper advice, not a condemnation of your attempts to get help. It's absurd that we live in a time like this but yet people STILL think it SHOULD be the norm to have to scream and throw hands and turn into an "uber Karen" just to get anywhere with your own medical health. It should not be so expected to have issues getting medical professionals to listen to us that when we don't manage it we get CRITICIZED for "not doing enough".
I've heard this before, not to me but overheard, and it disgusted me then too. Support should be all they offer, not judgement against you. If they judged, it should have been the medical "pros" who mangled your care!
If u don’t assert urself, u suffer
Why NOT then?
The AMA isn’t going to change! EVER
Until legally forced to!
@@YeshuaKingMessiah And it won’t get legally forced to as long as these whining women don’t sue, they just expect someone else to do it. Stupidity in a nutshell
I remember years back in the days when they made Home visits if needed, they were very good. Now I just wonder if people too often become a doctor because it was a highly respected position. Now all we seem to get is a tablet which when one investogates seem to have nasty side effects.
I remember when I was a child, 13 years old, and went to the doctor because of migraine attacks. I was dismissed, it wasn't possible in a child. I came back a while later, it became disabling in my daily life. Again, "it's just stress". The third time my mother came along. She got angry. Like, very angry.
Mind you, this doctor, was our family doctor. He knew my parents on a personal level. Yet he still dismissed my physical health. This isn't only women. It's also children. The reason I mention his personal connection with my parents is because my mother was diagnosed with migraines. And her sister. And her brother. And her mother. And her mother in law, even. The entire family had it.
But because of my age, I was dismissed. It took an angry mother to set him straight, and I can bet on it if they weren't familiar on a personal level, he'd have send us away with nothing. Needless to say I changed doctors and my life improved since. I've made it a mission to find female doctors since, because I don't want to spend time convincing a doctor my problem is real. And of course several years after this experience it became a topic in the news, newspapers wrote about it yadda yadda how 'suddenly' a lot of teenagers had migraines. No, they were simply ignored for decades. It's not new. It was simply ignored. But because it's "mostly women" who suffer from migraines, they had no reason to care. My mother, her mother and her sister were dismissed for decades because they were women. It's disgusting.
PS if anyone finds the story curious, in my country it's normal to go to the doctor alone if you want to even if you're very young. You're not forced to bring your parents to protect clients, so that's a good thing. My mother wanted me to learn these experiences from a very young age and I'm glad she did, it shaped me and made me stand up for myself.
I had them since I was a child too, but from about 7yrs old, my Dad used to get them, my sister gets them occasionally, but because it was the early 70’s I didn’t go to the Dr. They’re so debilitating.
I've had migraines since I was a teenager, but I didn't know what it was so no diagnosis in sight, just sleeping it off
Sadly, I remember thinking a female doctor would make a difference back when I was young but they are often worse than the men.
Sadly female doctors will dismiss your pain and symptomes too.
Just like my gp...
@@wolfsdream499Yup. Sexism is systematic default and subconscious. It's not even a better of people being bad ppl. They're just misogynistic by default UNLESS they utilise feminism and actively start to re-learn the pattern. And the thing is, that even as a feminist I wouldn't dare to state I'm beyond sexism. Hell no! Sorting out stuff in the subconscious is a hecking lot of hard and permanent work, especially while the systemic signals are STILL in process of being revised veeeeeeery sloooowly. 😮💨
And even when the pain is in your head (like psychosomatic) it’s not treated like the serious medical condition that it is. It took me ten years to find out there are real treatments for that, and it has nothing to do with a doctor rolling their eyes and telling me to ignore it
Absolutely! The pain is real, it’s just the cause is from the brain not the particular body part. All pain is real and triggered by the brain, but sometimes the brain misinterprets the info it gets
YES!!!! My husbands suffers from anxiety paired with flare-ups of hypochindriac and psychosomatic episodes. It is HELL when he has one of those episodes because no doctor takes him seriously. "Oh its just your imagination it's not real just ignore it" i hate it so much! They grinded so long in his self esteem with that BS that now every time he has an episode I have to reassure him, that YES he has pain/symptoms of any kind, they ARE real and imeven if we can not treat the root of it he CAN treat the symptom.
In my country, there is still no possibility of women having an epidural or getting any kind of painkiller after getting birth. And not only that, doctors will tell and "educate" women that the delivery is healthier for the baby when the mother feels pain. My friend had issues and the baby couldn't come out no matter how hard she pushed...instead of giving her an emergency c - section, they called in an obese nurse to press on her abdomen. This is their "equipment", an obese nurse. My friend fainted, they had to do the surgery anyway. The nurse pushing on top of her caused internal hemorrage. The baby almost died. And it happens a lot. A lot of young healthy women and their babies don't survive and if they do they are traumatized. This was the primary reason why I decided not to have children.
Omg this is horrific! I was the same, I fainted everytime I pushed and my baby spent 30 hours not moving (apparently he was comfortably sleeping while I was in labor 😂). They took me into theatre and used forceps and ONE MINUTE later he was born.
I cannot imagine what happened to your friend. I’m so sorry that happens to women in this day and age. 😢
Omg that is horrible! What country do u live in?? Im so sorry she had to go though something some traumatic.
Is your country still in the 1700's?
@@azearaazymoto461 Seems like it
At 13 I discovered a "divet" in my perineum. It took 5yrs for doctors to stop bouncing me from GYNO to Gastro (the divet collapsed, gained abscesses, etc etc) for someone to finally just order an MRI and tell me it was an anal fistula. It then took another 4 years for them to deem it "bad enough" to perform surgery to close it up.
I lived in a tropical country, the sweat would collect inside and cause atleast 6 abscesses a year that had to be drained from surgery.
Even after diagnoses and a history of draining on my chat. I would have to argue with ER doctors about "yes, it's a fistula, no an ultrasound won't show you it, fine let's waste my time, my money and everyone else's time with scanning just for you to say "we couldn't see anything, oh well, let's just slice up that abscess and send you home". >_>
In some cases at least being fat can be the problem.
When I got my Tubes Tied they discovered that I have endometriosis. I was still sent him with absolutely no pain medication and told that recovery is usually only a few days. Including surgery day, I took a whopping 2 days off of work.
:(
I was diagnosed with endometriosis only after I went to the ER in severe pain. I had a huge endometrial cyst on my right ovary. I was 32.
The years of telling doctors about the debilitating pain I experienced during my periods, irregular cycles, excessively heavy/long periods were ignored for 15 years. The difficulties I had trying to conceive were ignored for 5 years.
It wasn't until I was talking to my sister and best friend one day that I realized not everyone has periods as painful as mine.
Yes and people tell women if you're in severe pain, you should go to the doctor 😂
Sorry to hear :(
@@MelissaTroll right? What a joke. If I had a nickle for every time I was told my level of pain during periods was normal, I could've afforded better health care lol.
@@brittanyr9471 Even with better health care, there is basically no cure. You can surgically remove the tissues of the endometriosis, but it grows back. And that was also something no doctor told me or the internet. I heard it from another girl 😂
Right if you are living in the bathroom on your period because it hurts too much to walk to the bathroom, that isn't normal. I grew up thinking that way too.
I "lucked out" for getting diagnosed, but the doc's "cure" was unhinged like what century are you from. At 15 I went to the hospital with excruciating pain that for a while they feared was appendicitis but was eventually (after CT scan and ultrasound) they diagnosed as an ovarian cyst. I was given some pain killers and birth control to take for a few months. Then at 17 when I was still having severe pain on and off (not just during my period) I went back to the gyno who treated me in the hospital and he scheduled a laparoscopy a month later. He came in to see me before I went in for surgery and said "You're here for the hysterectomy, right?" When I said no, he flipped through my chart and said "Oh ya, that's right. I've been on vacation for a month, I forgot." I was diagnosed from that with endometriosis. The unhinged part was he said I could cure my endometriosis by getting pregnant, and then handed me a pamphlet about endo that said some women experience a temporary relief of symptoms while pregnant but it does not cure endometriosis. Oh, he also recommended I get pregnant to cure the ovarian cyst when I was 15 because I was still having pain after 3 months.
Even if getting pregnant was a cure for either condition, TEEN pregnancy is not a solution to anything.
HE RECOMMENDED THAT?! TEEN PREGNANCY IS DANGEROUS! Plus, what was he going to do if you actually followed through with his advice?! Kids have been kicked out for that!
The misconception that pregnancy cures diseases dates back to ancient greece. It's horrifying any modern doctor believes that, it's as bad as bloodletting.
EXCUSE ME???!
what is he endorsing to you, premarital sex??
I have adenomyosis and suspect estrogen dominance. A burst ovarian cyst put me in the ER. If anyone knew how much I hate making a big deal of things, they would know how much I hated to have to seek medical help. The ER gave me morphine and they were watching possible infection develop since the contents of the cyst spill into the abdomen. Do your own research, of course, but I found help taking over the counter bio-identical progesterone cream. I also went on a low-carb diet that I think helped as well.
Suggesting someone have a child for "relief" is possibly the most stupid and most irresponsible thing ever.
Not sure if this applies, but I had an experience at a dental office where my pain levels were very different than what they believed I had and the staff decided to go with their expectations rather than what I was saying. I had a dentist tell me after giving me a little shot that I shouldn’t feel anything as he went to pulling out my tooth. I told him I could feel everything. He went on to jab me with something pokey and asked me what he did, and I told him. We did this a few times more with me asking if he could finally inject more of the stuff. He got frustrated and insisted it was “pressure” I felt. He said if I didn’t cooperate and let him do the removal, he’d have to cancel and hire an anesthetic person to come in and who knew when that might be. I had to sit crying and screaming as quietly as I could while this man proceeded to remove four teeth with what felt an awful lot like two tablespoons. Yes, I felt everything though I “wasn’t supposed to”.😒I never went back.
That’s horrifying. I’m so sorry. My husband has had similar experiences where the normal amount of pain medication did not help in the least, and finally a dentist suggested he might have “The Ginger Gene.” My husband has dark brown-blackish hair and hair color doesn’t determine whether you have the gene or not. We looked it up and sure enough some people have this gene where anesthetics do not work as well on them. Sometimes you need more, and also other pain meds to get through procedures. They made a note on his chart and he hasn’t had problems since with that dentist. He also had problems with a colonoscopy. They kept having to give him more pain medication and he passed out from it. Usually a person stays awake during this procedure. He remembers as he passed out that he could still feel pain. Maybe look into this and bring literature with you next time you need to discuss pain management.
I'm terribly sorry! Also: are you having red hair or known to have any connective tissue disease? Because both are known to mess with anesthetic efficiency.
I REALLY recommend you start looking into this now! Especially should you have hypermobility. Look up EDS!
Even if it's not that, you can learn about how the processing of anesthetics can get affected. It can also be genetic disposition.
You NEED to figure this out noe, because you really really do not want to ever have to have emergency surgery and for anesthesia to fail. Thus is you can figure out what is causing your bodies resistance, you'll be equipped to advocate for yourself with medical diagnostic paperwork and anesthesiologist will have an easier time deciding which anesthetics and form of anesthesia to use.
You ABSOLUTELY want to talk to your anesthesiologist about this episode for any planned surgery in future!
I had similar experiences but I wad lucky to insist on further numbing and they were worried and said "you're tiny and with that dosage I could put an elephant under" (figuratively speaking, of course). They were really stunned.
I'm currently on the journey of figuring mine out.
Also you should know that connective tissue disorders can actually mean that being hyper- and hypo-sensitive to anesthetics can be area related or even day-to-day related and must be approached step by step till it kicks in.
It's just imposant they plan in the time after you explicitly telling them to please plan time cause you had issues before!
Lmao the way I would have taken the pain in my mouth over that... I'd have said "FUCK IT I WILL TAKE MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE, YOU'RE A HACK." and left... Like, listen to me or fk off (and I have had mouth pain from my teeth so bad I was vomiting due to it - so I do not say this lightly). I admire your strength is what I mean, since I PHYSICALLY could NOT have done that AT ALL... though I do feel you should not have had to and should not have put yourself through that, I also live in Canada and its a bit different where I live to many others around the world I guess...
That is just awful, absolutely awful. Went through all that, could clearly see that you were feeling pain and just ignored you. Absolute monster of a dentist, that one!
Oh my goodness, thank you for this information! My dentist has always had to give me extra injections because one is never enough on me. I bet it is because of this, as my mother is a ginger. Luckily, he's kind and has never doubted me. However, he retired now, so I have to look for a new one, and I'll make sure to keep this in mind.
@@WarriorJournals Perhaps get your old records, or even a quick note from your dentist on his letterhead, to take with you to the new dentist.
I'm so afraid of something like this happening to me and my loved ones. How are we supposed to trust and respect doctors when they don't trust and respect us?
forreal though!
It's so true that there's institutional sexism within the medical system that even feme doctors perpetuate. It's awesome to see you talking about these issues so openly and compassionately. I hope that these gaps will begin to close as more people become aware that they're present.
This is so true and frustrating.
Especially women with ADHD.
Most people don't know that 45% of women with ADHD also have PMDD, but it gets misdiagnosed as Bi Polar 2, way too frequently.
My sister LITERALLY is one of those women who got the misdiagnosis. Took YEARS to finally get the right of it with the physicals and she's been delayed in learning to deal with the MH issues she DOES have because of this stupid misdiagnosis.
@@bakaichigo I'm so sorry. It really sucks because thousands of women get misdiagnosed because it "obviously" has to be an emotional issue....🙄🙄.
What is pmdd?
To add to this, I was born in 1976. My mom was offered Phentermine to prevent “a lot of weight gain”… Not only was pain dismissed, but male doctors were concerned about a woman “getting fat”!!!
She refused, btw.
I hate to defend the doctors, but back then, the 'ideal' bay was small enough to be born easily - and the more weight the mother gained, the larger the baby often was. Not an excuse, but that was the reasoning. I was fortunate to not have a dr that subscribed to that to the extent of prescribing drugs, but they did want me to keep my weight gain down. Not happening with my body, sorry. Of course, I would be a textbook example of WHY you should take those drugs - my babies were 10 and 11 pounds. I gained around 60 pounds with each of them - but 20+ of that was baby and fluid.
As a person with endometriosis, fEDS, osteoarthritis, and more, I am constantly angry at how badly we are treated. I’ve been lucky enough to finally find a GP who knows about pain; respects my descriptions of my pain; who has learned to trust me with problematic medications on the very rare occasions when I ask for them. Most women never get that kind of care and respect, and everyone should.
Can you make a video on tips for what women can do so they are more likely to get the care they need in current system?
One tip I hear in America a lot is that, we should never mention words like anxious, stressed and other "negative feelings", or else we'll automatically be undertreated.
That's not a solution. In fact actually advocate for yourself. Aka ask questions like "how aware are you of sexistic biases in medicine?" and "I have the impression that this isn't working for me and I also have the impression you're not listening but stuck on some bias. I'll need you to be more specific on why you think this treatment plan is the way to go and I need you to stop for a moment and check yourself for biases. I'm not telling you that it doesn't feel right cause I WANT to be annoying. So, please tell me what it would take for you to listen and please check in with yourself if you'd make any adjustments if the person sitting before you was a man"
Keep the tone completely calm but really directly address your concerns for bias. If they react badly to that then they're not on your team. A doctor on your team will stop and take your concern and need for further explanation of their treatment plan and diagnosis seriously.
Here's how to get better treatment. Be a white, wealthy male. You'll get all the treatment you could ever need at the drop of a hat.
I know this because my white, wealthy cousins get seen and treated almost immediately, whereas I don't even get an appointment because I'm a woman.
Bringing a man with you could help, if one you trust is available.
I really appreciate you raising this issue. Women need male allies.
reminds me of that time they canceled (or recalled? something major happened) male birth control because of all the side effects it was causing on the users. however female birth control, despite its side effects, is still pushed to be used
Yes, as if it is entirely the females job to make sure there's no unwanted pregnancy!
@@huntressmma1822 THE EGGS ARE INNOCENT 🗣🗣🗣‼‼
That's because of the way clinical trials work. A drug is deemed safe if the benefits of taking it outweigh the risks. For a woman, the physical risks of getting pregnant outweigh the risks of birth control side effects, so getting approval is easy.
However, for men, there's no physical risk involved with their partner getting pregnant, so any side effects will automatically disqualify the drug because the risks (as the trial sees it) outweigh the benefits.
In order for male birth control to be approved, the trial needs to look at the man's holistic needs and the needs of his partner, not just his physical health, which would be a big change from the way trials are currently conducted.
@@rizahawkeyepierce1380 of course they are
@@pineapple2.041i think you missed the "as if" in the comment you responded to lol
I've had severe pain in my left shoulder and arm for over 6 months now. I can't move my arm due to the pain, I can't sleep either. The reccomended treatment for this is stereoid shots into the affected area for pain relief. All I've gotten is "go se a physiotherapist" and "what do you want me to do about it?". I have literally never felt pain like this before and I have endomitriosis. I can't even get dressed due to the pain. But keep getting dismissed. They won't even try to figure out why I'm in such pain. All I have is paracetamol and that only takes the edge of it.
I had shoulder pain and numbness down my left arm which was caused by my endo. Struggled with it for years...after laproscopic excision for my endo it was better. There are a lot of nerves in your pelvis and referred pain does crazy things!
@clairejohnson9888 My left shoulder has had to deal with two rounds of shingles, a hit-and-run accident, and Lyme disease. It could really be anything at this point. It's not frozen shoulder nor arthritis, those have been ruled out. They're blaming it all on my ME. I also have hEDS, but they won't acknowledge it at all.
I had similar pain, from a pinched nerve in my neck, went to an ER and got nothing, told to take Aleve (acetaminophen does nothing for me if I have pain). No xrays, didn’t see a physician, finally had to consult my previous pain doc, who took an MRI and said I had a large bulging disc in my neck. I still take meds for nerve pain.
Did they check your rotator cuffs? I had sudden pain in my shoulder and arms and it was a torn cuff. If they haven't checked that, see if you can make them. I'm so sorry you have to be in such pain all the time. 😞
@cucamongaphilips I have suggested that and torn muscles and anything I could think of. But they've all been ruled out. I have a new physiotherapist, and she just said that asking a doctor to sign off on an MRI would be pointless. It should have been done months ago. She said that in a dejected tone mostly to herself. I agree. They should have done an MRI once the pain didn't subside.
Physiotherapy is helping, just very slowly.
Thank you. 🩷
I had a total hysterectomy and they sent me home THE SAME DAY after my surgery despite the fact I could barely walk. I kept calling afterward because something definitely didn’t feel right, and I kept being Rx’d useless anti nausea pills and being told it was “just the anesthesia wearing off.” Come to find out, I had a raging UTI from the Foley catheter that was in during surgery. Only took them 10 days later to get me on the correct antibiotic. 🤬
And this is one reason to demand that any provider document when they decline or refuse to run tests or prescribe medications with the reason why when 1) you know they'd do so for a man and/or 2) you request it and are denied. Yes, you may not always need that antibiotic, painkiller, or test, but forcing them to give a documented reason will leave a paper trail for anything ongoing or may make them reconsider if it's bias (or laziness or whatever).
OMFG this is EXCELLENT advice! At least it leaves something to go on if something really bad happens as result of their denials - you can work up a suit more easily. :)
@@bakaichigo I found this advice years ago, iirc, on either another YT channel or in an article about a woman whose chronic condition wasn't properly diagnosed for years because doctors wouldn't run certain tests. I've seen it advised several times since then in different places and always try to spread it, too.
I’m diagnosed with heart failure since three years, and medicated with a cocktail of five medicines and my cardiologist is pushing strongly for an ICD. Non-smoker, low blood preassure, don’t drink alcohol, BMI 21, walk 11-19 km/day at work, eat almost no meat. Initially, the doctors had the nerve to suggest panic disorder, one even said that my symptoms don’t exist, as one either has chest pains or not, and not only sometimes.
Edit: oh, and I’m a woman.
Yikes, I got diagnosed with heart failure in Jan 2020...right b4 covid shtf...EF under 13% (pretty bad)...got the ICD installed (horror story, first one got infected, had to be removed, second implant on the right side because, lull in covid cases meant they needed to implant asap, before left side had healed fully, but, fun fun, couldn't install the 3rd lead so the left branch bundle block could be bypassed, allowing my left ventricle to *work again*, 4th surgery got it all complete, finally) and EF is now 25%...still bad, but livable!
Best of luck to you, and praying too, you never know 🤣
"And not only sometimes"
Those are some truly incompetent doctors, because they just completely ignored that TRANSIENT HEART issues do, infact, exist. Its a whole thing - there've even been huge medical drama shows on TV that used these types of heart conditions in their shows as PLOTS! Its easily found on google, even. I am so sorry you've had to deal with this! How scary D:
And heaven help you if you dare to be an overweight woman. I can't count how many times I went to the doctor for anything and was told to lose weight and I'd be fine. No, the multiple cysts on my uterus and ovaries couldn't possibly be the cause of my abdominal pain.
I know it's still not as bad as your situation, doctors will blame you for not doing enough AND ignore you- rather than jist ignore you, but thin women also get shooed out the door based only on their weight. I can't tell you how many doctors did not listen to a word I said, wrote in my chart "appeared healthy and alert", when my blood pressure was walking dead man low and I couldn't talk- my dad had to do all of the talking for me. I had a neurologist accuse me of wanting to have side effects, quote regarding a treatment my current neurologist says I cannot do; "there won't be any side effects. Unless you want to have side effects. Do you want to have side effects?" I would harass my primary every day for 10 years until he finally allowed me to see a cardiologist - after I had blacked out from a small cut and heatedly argued with him that my blood pressure was literally so low I could drop dead any second. The cardiologist had to be the one to put in the recommendation I get a new primary, one who specialized in women's health. The only time my weight worked in my favor was when I dropped 10lbs in 2 days, 30lbs over a two week period.
I now have a very long list of disabling conditions - most could have been treated so they didn't become permanently disabling, or outright prevented. Even a female gynecologist, who said I couldn't possibly have endometriosis (I obviously did), because I was too young and it wasn't genetic (my mother had many surgeries for it, and research points to it very much being genetic).
Have you been tested for PCOS? I was told for years that even though I had ovarian cysts over and over that required surgical intervention that I didn't meet the criteria for polycystic ovarian syndrome because I was overweight and didn't have facial hair. Eventually found a doctor that did an exploratory surgery and confirmed that I did have PCOS but also endometriosis and pelvic inflammatory disease. Eventually at age thirty had a total hysterectomy. Had an ovary grow back and had to have another huge surgery and they found scar tissue had wrapped around my ureter, took thirteen hours. Now I don't trust any doctors and try to never go except for a check up
I truly empathize. My mother was over weight most of her adult life and had that same experience. We all know now that she had thyroid issues.😢
She nearly died twice because Doctors ignored her, once for appendex and then gal bladder, but eventually died because she had a huge Cancerous tumour in her gut. She knew something was wrong in her gut but no one would listen.
Do as they say and then come back. Easy.
@@user-ix4sq7pf3c I do have PCOS. I've had the cysts drained once, and ended up having a hysterectomy a year ago because my insurance would rather pay for that than for the medicine to deal with the cysts.
Yep. Consistently told my joint pain was "psychosomatic", but when I took my dad with me cos we have the same symptoms we were finally diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome by a Rheumatologist then a geneticist. I had asked two different Rheumatologists if I could have EDS and the first one said "no, it's too rare, you're just fat" and the second one said "you're not in enough pain to have EDS". I genuinely wanted to slap that same guy because I was clinging on with my FINGERNAILS. He was the same guy who went on to diagnose my dad and me, and ofc he never apologised for minimizing my pain!! It was so messed up that I was almost GRATEFUL when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis too because you can't fake the blood tests and it was conclusive (and off the charts).
im glad im seeing more about EDS in media and stuff but the fact that its most visible/symptomatic in women is imo whats held back diagnosis so long for most people.
I was getting multiple symptoms which I saw as a red flag in terms of my period. I knew there was something wrong but my mother wouldn't allow me to see a doctor for multiple reasons including they'll just dismiss it and say it's normal. I did my own research and what I was experiencing seems to align with symptoms of endometriosis which was ironic considering the fact that I want to do a project on endometriosis and how medicine fails women. Recently I've found out that endometriosis is very common in my family (from both my mum and dad 's side of the family) I've been listening to my cousins stories of how the nhs has failed them. One got misdiagnosed with pcos and the later told "it's sorted itself out and gone away." She finally went to a private doctor and got diagnosed with stage four endometriosis. Had it been taken seriously earlier and caught in an earlier stage, she would not have suffered as much.
She still would have suffered but she would have known what she is suffering with.
@@MsPeabody1231 if she was caught in an earlier stage, it may have been less painful. It's only been getting worse to the point it's entered state 4. My other cousin got diagnosed whilst having her appendix removed, she was in stage one then and she managed to quickly get treatment.
It was 5 months before I was finally diagnosed with diverticulitis. After another month of antibiotics failing I finally got sent to the hospital. My bowel perfed the following morning and when I begged my doctors for help I got laughed at. The hospitalist told me I was just anxious. The gastroenterologist told me I didn’t have a gi problem and to see a gynecologist. The pain was so bad that I couldn’t move. I sounded like I had hiccups because I was only able to take tiny breaths. I was dying and knew it and they left me like that for a day and a half. At one point I started praying to die faster so the pain would stop.
I had no history of gynecological problems or anxiety yet those made more sense to my doctors instead of the diverticulitis they knew I had causing a perforation. It felt like I was being tortured and I am now terrified of doctors after that.
I was begging for my life and my doctors left me dying.
It took 7 years for a Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome diagnosis and 4 years to get an endometriosis diagnosis. Also, my IUD insertion was so painful I had contractions and it caused an immediate CVS episode, first and last time (hopefully) that that's ever happened. It freaking sucks to be a woman sometimes.
Currently dealing with tailbone pain after falling down the stairs TWO YEARS AGO. Went to a pain management doctor over an hour away for him to ask "what did you expect us to do?" I said help my pain. He prescribed lidocaine patches that are out of stock everywhere. Still trying to figure out how to get one in between my butt cheeks, but since ill never get them, guess I don't have to worry about it. Too bad I have a desk job, right guys? The pain never leaves! 😅
Oh man I have the same problem. They never even checked my tailbone and I can tell it broke and healed extremely crooked, to one side. It hurts really bad to sit for long.
.. So I often bring a discreet sitting pillow ( that's kinda less hard in the midde) to work and make up reasons to get up frequently .. because apparently asking for an xray or even a quick touch for disgnosis is too much to ask for.
All the best!
@cognitivedissonance7422 yeah, the pillows aren't helping 😭 but I think that's what happened to me. And I've had x-rays, and a botched mri and they claimed to see nothing! But then where is the pain coming from, doc? 😫
Amazon has lidocaine patches.
@@susanstarks109 apparently they aren't the right dosage. I'm just not sure they're going to be any help.
I had tailbone pain for well over a year, even on really high doses of pain meds and it still didn't help! I eventually had a manipulation, where they move it back into position. That didn't help either, so I ended up needing a coccyxectomy where they removed the part that was out of place! I haven't had pain since then 😊
I suffered for 9 years because I was incorrectly diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, not the autoimmune disease that affcted my nervous system that I actually had.
I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at 13. It was actually pernicious anemia, and since the antidepressants did help with the panic attacks and some anxiety, doctors thought treatment wad working and anything I struggled with was just in my head. My antidepressants changed and the dose increased over the years. I dropped out of college and was a recluse for a few years. I finally did better after I walked to my woman PA and she did a b12 level labs, found I had intrinsic factor antibodies, diagnosed me with pernicious anemia, and prescribed b12 injections for life. Even then, she only gave me one mL every two months after the booster injections. In the UK, when someone has neuropathic symptoms and damaged nerves like me, 1 mL every single day is the norm. I buy B12 from Mexico since my doctor won't prescribe me more.
Shout out to the doctor I saw in the ER for extreme abdominal pain and abnormal bleeding.
He admitted he wasn't qualified and referred me to a Women's emergency clinic nearby.
I had a Ruptured Cyst with torsion and could have gone necrotic,
if I was unlucky like many women before me I could have been told it was "just my period" and sent away into a forgotten corner
and gotten dangerously worse and worse.
Him believing me, admitting his inability to aid me and sending me somewhere that could, probably saved my life.
This is why I never want to give birth
Having had 8 children, 5 with no medication, and gallbladder attacks (unrelated) I can tell you that birth isn't bad (until transition, when it's almost over) unless the hospital forces you into their protocol.
@@mansfieldfamily5389 medication as in epidural ?
@@mansfieldfamily5389you aren’t everyone - consider yourself lucky that ‘it wasn’t that bad’ for YOU.
You have to consider that not all babies are the same size, not all vulvas/vaginas/pelvic bones are the same size and I’m sure there are many countless other genetic and bodily traits that vary from person to person for some people to experience extreme pain from birth/periods etc. that some other women don’t experience.
My mum would disagree with that from having me and being refused any pain relief during my birth - and I’ve heard so many other women talk about how difficult and painful their births were.
@@satyam168 that is correct. No epidural for five of the eight. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard or painful; it just wasn’t overall bad. It felt like immense and wonderful power. I was in awe with my body. While you’re in the middle of transition you wonder what you were thinking, but that passes so quickly.
The induced births, on the other hand, made me want to die until I got an epidural. One epidural almost killed me, the other only worked for half my body. Pitocin feels like barbed wire squeezing your uterus.
Then again i know a woman who got pitocin and didn’t need an epidural. Everyone is different, but birth is not torture, though some medical interventions can make it feel that way.
@@satyam168 I’ll bet she wasn’t allowed to move around during it. Being flat on your back while laboring is absolute hell.
I have no judgment for those who choose epidurals. I just think more knowledge of the beauty and power of birth is worth sharing. Hospitals are great for emergencies, but their policies and protocols can make normal birth harder than it needs to be.
I tried an IUD for the first time 4 years ago. I was told it would be “just a pinch” and given Tylenol. I have severe PTSD now from that procedure. It was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever gone through. Contractions for over 8 hours and I was looked at like I was crazy. It was removed 3 weeks later. IUDs shouldn’t be done unless you’re knocked out. Especially for those of us who never have had kids nor want them. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of my own nightmare dealing with doctors
Same, got one. I didn't have contractions for 8 hours, but "just a pinch", my ASS. Then I had to walk home. Got it removed after 3 days because I could feel it all the time. Fuck IUDs.
It’s other conditions besides pain, too. I’ve had a seizure disorder since I was 2, but no neurologist has ever been able to diagnose what it is. If a seizure gets bad enough and becomes a grand mal, I go unconscious and my airway clamps down, so I have to be intubated in order to force air into my lungs. I bit off part of my tongue when I was 6 (just a little bit, luckily; it’s not obvious by looking at it) and have brain damage (Broca’s aphasia, which makes it hard for me to speak) from being deprived of oxygen for 10 minutes when I was 2.
I went to a new neurologist a few years ago to get paperwork signed for college disability letters, and he did all the same tests that I’ve had before. As always, there was nothing that could give a conclusive diagnosis. Then, I mentioned that I have PTSD from some abuse that happened to me, and, suddenly, the neurologist lit up. He declared that I have a conversion disorder.
I went home and looked it up. “Conversion disorder” is effectively the 21st-Century term for hysteria. The doctor decided that my seizures were all from stress being converted into neurological problems-problems that he said aren’t really there and would go away if I stopped being stressed. This man decided that my 2-year-old self just got too stressed and decided to seize, go unconscious, stop breathing for 10 minutes, and get permanent brain damage. I was so angry.
I met another person with my same seizure symptoms, and she said the exact same thing: all the same tests, no real diagnosis, except she was never given the hysteria label. I guess she and I just have some unknown seizure condition.
Yes this!
The pain scale is largely lacking IMO as a woman as well. I go to the hospital in pain with numbness and tingling in my back, they ask me "what's your pain level with ten being labor and delivery" my brain did a calibration and says "14" and they look at me like "no you would not be conscious" and it's like well then let's calibrate child birth down to a 6/7 🤷🏼♀️ The pain scale also doesn't seem to take into account that many of us women are so used to pain many days of the month that we have learned to sort of just smile and nod through a lot of pain rather than complain. Like before I ever go to the hospital for anything I need to be in bad state as I have extreme medical anxiety, before I've been to the hospital I'm throwing up, shaking severely, moaning, clammy, etc but I get to the hospital and I kind of disassociate in fear. These symptoms tend to stop (minus vomiting) and they don't want to treat it as pain. It's got to a point I just sign a DNR if I go in and have done so for nearly 20 years! It's freakin exhausting to literally be in pain EVERYDAY and to know that BC the Dr won't take it seriously that I am killing my liver and stomach lining with Tylenol and advil! My last GP diagnosed me with degenerative disc disease in L5 S1 and arthritis in my pelvis, hip and back. He did this through many tests and a CT scan where you could literally see the damage. He retired. My new doctor says "I don't see this in your chart. Your inflammation is off the charts but no arthritis. I'm not going back to your early 20s to look for a CT scan that was used for this diagnosis. Everyone your age (38 at the time) has some disc degeneration, it's normal!" Like ok Dr but it wasn't normal in 2000-2008 while my Dr was testing me for EVERYTHING trying to figure out my pain. 20 year olds don't have this stuff normally. Also be Dr doesn't care that my aunt has the spooning and such on her hands from rheumatoid arthritis, she tests negative for it but her scans have said otherwise since she was 14! I'm negative as well and my old Dr recognized that not everyone tests positive and you need to look at the scans! Then I get the whole "I wonder why your inflammation is so high, let's keep doing the same tests!" It's absurd and since I'm in Canada we have a Dr shortage where most ppl don't even have a family Dr in my town so I'm stuck with this dude who doesn't listen. It's a rural town. I have PTSD and am on disability for it. I shouldn't be going through an the same specialists who found nothing and being forced to travel 6 or more hours and needing Ativan etc all BC he doesn't trust scans he won't even look at... Some times I'm not in any pain (normally if I'm sick my normal pain stops) and other times I go through 400 extra strength Tylenol in a month BC I would rather die of liver failure than be writhing in pain 🤷🏼♀️
We need more doctors and those drs need to freakin listen.
That's the first time I've heard anyone say that disk degeneration at age 38 is normal. I beg to differ.
@@resourcedragon I have disc degeneration and facet joint degeneration, diagnosed by an MRI when I was 41. I had experienced moderate to severe pain in my lower back for over 10 years by that point, and had begged for an MRI for most of that decade. It was only agreed when I saw a private physio (had already seen a lot of NHS physios, who said nothing was wrong, do some exercises, most of which were unsuitable as I also have Joint Hypermobility Syndrome/poss hEDS) who immediately suggested facet joint degeneration due to certain painful spots on my pelvis where the ligaments attach from the facet joint area.
Luckily the GP I saw that time examined the same location, agreed with the suggestion, and referred me for MRI.
I have been told the damage in my spine is normal for a 41 year old, but they failed to accept I had potentially had this for over 10 years. Rheumatoid Arthritis runs in my family, and I already have a lot of the comorbidities.
I haven't been given anything to help with the pain, nor with the pain I experience with a whole smorgasbord of other chronic conditions, some of which are severe and have chronic pain as a main symptom.
I haven't even been referred to a pain clinic, despite not being able to tolerate most medicine due to two of my illnesses causing sensitivity to medication, and a rare allergy to an ingredient that is in 90% of medicine (we don't have compounding pharmacies in the UK).
Apparently I'm supposed to live my life housebound and in pain...
@@resourcedragon I was early 20s when diagnosed too! The new Dr won't look back BC there is so much in my chart BC my Dr was trying to figure out pain and my PTSD at the same time... My old Dr showed me the CT scans on the computer that are in my digital file, you could easily see the arthritis and disc degeneration! Even I could see the damage. He always did a great job of pulling the actual imaging and looking and explaining etc so it's been very disappointing to have a new, young Dr who "knows it all" but can't even pull up a DIGITAL file and the digital notes smh 🤷🏼♀️
@@resourcedragon oh and the CT scan tech told me when I got a follow up scan a year after diagnosis that it wasn't normal and that she was sorry I must be in horrible pain all the time BC it's common in elderly ppl whose nerves are more dulled and it's painful for them so it's got to be 10x worse for someone whose nerves are young. I have no clue on her science about the nerves but it makes sense to a degree BC they say not to use lots of products with elderly ppl as they may not feel things as easily, like heating pads!
They don't seem to realize that if someone with chronic pain passed out every time they felt it, they wouldn't be able to be talking to a doctor. They'd either be dead or effectively comatose.
❤❤❤...Dr...also bladder infections...years of misdiagnosis ramping up to serious kidney issues. It seems to me, female medical issues are a ready-made and forever guaranteed money maker for the medical industry (at least here in US). Thank you for the mention.
Saw 3 drs and went to the ER once over a course of 4 years before getting a dr to believe me when I told them I thought I had endometriosis. Finally got a dr who believed me and did a laparoscopy on me yesterday and diagnosed me with stage 1 endometriosis. I'm already seeing positive results even after just 1 day!
Thank you for addressing this issue. My sister in law had servere back pains for three years. Her doctor said it was imaginary. Then he tested her for bone cancer and three months later she was dead. My mother had severe pain an discharge which the doctor claimed was menopause. But she had cervix cancer. I was refused pain medication during delivery and forced to undergo internal exam during contractions. The list goes on and on. Glad to see this pointed out and i hope things are changing....
The craziest thing I've read is that, up until recently, the absorption of tampons was tested with SALINE instead of blood! They've only recently (like the last year or so) done the first proper trials using human blood. Insane.
You probably read that on a feminist article.
Its not hard to use animal blood or fake the viscosity of human blood and its specific gravity.
There are plenty of research in the subject going back decades.
@@doc_vader2776 So why didn't they use it if that is so cheap and easy?
@@doc_vader2776 If you spend ten seconds googling you can find tons of articles from many reputable sources (including non “feminist” ones) talking about this. Most menstrual products are still tested with saline, which leads to them absorbing less blood than they claim. I don’t know why you would deny this. Deranged ahh
@@doc_vader2776 this is not "muh feminism". Even period pad ads have been using blue-colored water with diluted gelatin instead of real period. Assuming you are a man, just because you are treated better by doctors doesn't mean others are treated that way.
@@RebelWvlf Jokes on you . I am a doctor. I like how you conveniently ignored the part where I said there is research on the topic going back decades.
They test it on all sorts of fluids.
Some body cherry-picked one where they used Normal Saline and wrote articles in some feminist magazines which spread like wildfire.
I am a feminist myself. Got nothing against it.
This is infuriating for real....
womp womp
That only prove women can endure more than men but hey, once your brain has passed 5 grade, come back@@Giga3D811
@@Giga3D811 shut up
Thank you 😊 . I'm going to show this to my doctor. I'm tired of hurting 24/7
I have an endometriosis diagnosis, and had 4 surgeries with specialists, my GPs still question my pain (women and men).
There is no where left to go to get help pain- how is that ‘okay’? And me even suggesting I receive very little effective relief from painkillers is seen as ‘kooky’.
Nvm the pain relief, if I got a nice buzz from pain killers (like my husband got off normal strength cocodamol after tendon reattachment) I think I’d definitely care less and cope with pain better. I had my whole peritoneal lining removed as there was more growth and scarring than good tissue, and wasn’t given anything different to my usual painkiller. I didn’t really think about how there may be biological differences to back this up.
Dr Karan don’t make me cry.
Also sign me up to any studies- please!
I have a chronic pain condition, AND at the time, also had endometreosis.
I remember my GP giving me a copy of a report from a specialist that he'd referred me to (he always gives me the reports) a medical pain specialist - as in the medication aspect of treatment, rather than OT or Rheumatology/Orthopaedic etc.
This complete numpty, who only saw me twice, felt qualified to say he thought "she over estimates her pain" after the 1st appt., and proceeded to mess with my pain management AND anti-depressants! 🤦🏻♀️
The second time I saw him him he was wearing a large wrist brace - I've never been so happy to see someone else in pain!
His stupidity caused me 6 months of medical mayhem, and my GP would not send me back.
I'll never forget what he wouldn't say to my face. I'll never forget his name either ...
The fact that I 'prepare myself' for important appointments, rest up, do very little 2-3 days before (and can take up to a week to recover, depending on the distance travelled, wait time, and forced concentration of the appt,) did not occur to him, nor did he ask. He had zero concept of what it 'cost' to be, and remain, 'present' for the appointment, of the level of preparation and recovery ...
I've had plenty of bad specialists in the last 40 odd years (of pain & life altering conditions) but that one stands out as one of the worst.
"... overestimates her pain ..." wanna swap, you ar$e?!
what's baffling is that it is also often FEMALE providers who do the dismissing, gaslighting, abusing of their patients. it never stops shocking me when I go to gynecologists who cold hearted they are. they will find any weird random reason to make your situation your fault even when there is an actual pathology. frustrating.
It’s internalized misogyny and also training, I am a med student and I remember some doctors/professors sometimes throw in « women are dramatic » when talking about patients so sadly it’s even included in the training to not believe women when they describe their symptoms. It gives me the ick and I usually immediately lose respect for that doctor.
My friend got knee replacement surgery. She was in constant debilitating pain. She had to be in a wheelchair. Her orthopedist fired her as a patient. Fortunately, her family doctor believed her and found her a new orthopedist. He discovered the first one put the wrong size knee in, and she had to have the surgery all over again. It took a year for her to get the help she needed.
I hope she brought suit against the first one!
There are studies about pain medication on women, and it is studied how these work in women, e.g. Metabolism and pharmacokinetic/logical profile.
The issue is, the number of samples is low, so that the outliers are often excluded. These outliers could be subgroup of people that respond differently, and could actually be significant number in the population, which however, is not observed due the small sample size.
I wish other doctors would acknowledge this. This is TRULY a massive issue in women's health! Thank you, Dr. Karan for this video and showing us some empathy!
My daughter has stage 4 endometriosis and the ER would send her home with extra strength Tylenol… SERIOUSLY!!!! Her pain was off the charts and this was the best they could do? We need to do better!! She finally had surgery, took 2+ hours and was found to be bleeding internally… Doing much better.
Ladies, we have to make sure doctors document any time they refuse treatment, and request the fuck out of painkillers or tests: whatever you think you need, insist, and if you can't get through, tell them to mark down that they are refusing to give it to you. That'll shape the docs up. They know you document things because you plan to sue them for malpractice if you have anything they could have prevented or helped with sooner had they listened.
bro i had severe UTI pain when i was 9 years old and my parents were told by a female doctor that i was faking it for attention until my UTI got so bad that i ended it up in the hospital and it took me so long to get better . like i went through all that pain and struggle just because a doctor was too lazy to do her freaking job like wtf ? and yes i think she did that to me because i am a female there are no other explanations really .
At that age, probably more because you were a child rather than a girl--doctors can be incredibly dismissive of children as well, saying that they're lying for attention or to get out of school (mild example, but I had a very bad sore throat at 14 that just wouldn't go away, and on week 2 I finally went to the doctor with my mother. The doctor *clearly* thought I was lying to get out of school or some shit, and was visibly surprised at how swollen my glands were when he actually palpated my neck 🙄. Turns out it was strep and I got some antibiotics)
Even if you were faking excruciating pain to get attention, it seems like that should be cause for concern. Like if I had a kid who felt they needed to do that to get attention, I'd be pretty interested in figuring out why they feel the need to do that and finding healthier ways for them to express that need.
Excellent!! I was treated like a psych case and denied an MRI despite being very specific about the degree and location of the pain I had in my head. For three years! No one would listen to me. They just wanted to put me on Prozac. I went to Mexico and paid for an MRI. Turns out, I had a brain tumor and 3-4 months (six on the outside) to live without intervention.
I was told my first migraine was “anxiety” and that my blurry vision was “just getting older” despite being 29 at the time 😐. I was also told my gallstones-which can be more painful than childbirth-were back spasms and to literally “walk it off.” Imagine being in excruciating pain and they just let you lie curled up in a ball on the couch for an hour and a half and then they dismiss it as “back spasms!” Talk about gaslighting!
My doctor ; "Why didn't you say anything about this pain?" Me; "because I have complained about this for years and no one ever listened."
With my fourth pregnancy, after 5 hours in the er, I was told to go home to wait for my labor to progress. I refused and demanded another doctor examine me. 14 minutes later, crowning in the elevator, I was being admonished for waiting so long to get to the hospital. Like I’ve never done this before.
Dr Karan, I wish you were my doctor!!
I have dealt with severe pain in my upper right abdominal quadrant for about 6 years now. I was just diagnosed with hyperkinetic gallbladder and it needs to be removed. A woman surgeon diagnosed me. My male doctor told me it was psychological for years.
THANK YOU!! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 The only substances I know of that have been studied for gender differences are:
1. Metabolism of alcohol
2. Chemotherapy dosing because a person is dosed based on their body surface area (BSA)
If there are any I missed, please let me know. I also had endometriosis and the pain was dismissed as “bad menstrual cramps.” Bad doesn’t begin to describe it. I almost passed out. I had a male OB/Gyn (he since lost his license) scrape my uterus for something he saw and that time I did pass out. No pain meds. Nothing.
You, sir, are amazing. I'm sitting here 11 days post-op from a total hysterectomy with a vertical abdominal approach, and I'm out of meds and left with take some Tylenol.
It took forever to find a med that actually touched my Endometriosis pain. I'm thankful for multiple female PAs who were mothers and took the time to help treat my pain. A lot of my pcp doctors are either women with endometriosis or women with children. I feel as though they understand the pain more. I do see male doctors for things that have been wonderful, but overall, I've had a great experience with PAs that are moms when it comes to treating pain.
THANK YOU
Welcome
As a woman who was only diagnosed with AuHD well into adulthood after several breakdowns and burnouts, thank you for bringing awareness to the discrepancy of women’s treatment in medicine. I mourn for the life I could have had if my struggles had been taken seriously but all we can do is push for change so that we can build a more equitable healthcare system.
I had a doctor tell me I must be depressed because I kept getting strep throat. I went to an ENT and cured my strep throat. And never returned to that first doctor.
Here’s a tip I heard. If a doctor tries to dismiss you, DEMAND TO GET IT IN WRITING. Majority of the time they’ll suddenly have an availability for you, or they can get in trouble.
This seems to be the most effective advice for dealing with any professional; always get it in writing.
Any denial of medical procedures, being "fired", price changes for ongoing projects; if you have an ongoing or assumed contract with any professional, get these things in writing.
@@ShegrasiRegalis I've heard it as advice in a reddit thread for quitting jobs and ruining employers as lovely karma to those jerk bosses, but it works for EVERYTHING with legal issues: DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT. DOCUMENT.
Oral contraceptives being made with male anatomy in mind is the biggest bruh moment for me...
😩 This is a must needed topic/conversation 👏👍
Pain is trauma. These doctors who dismiss us, who hear us say "pain" and turn it into "discomfort" aren't just misdiagnosing us, they are leaving us in pain for years to decades (as in my case) and CAUSING Complex PTSD with their actions. But they will never admit it, they will never be held accountable because they will always be believed over a sick person, because in our society, now, illness is considered a character flaw. Illness is considered a deserved "result" of not following the magical "healthy diet and exercise" panacea that preventative medicine mutated into, and which people who are rarely ill (which is 99% of those who make it through medical training) like to credit their good health to, instead of the good genes, good childhood nutrition and luck that is the truth.
"In our society, now, illness is considered a character flaw. Illness is considered a deserved "result" of not following the magical "healthy diet and exercise" panacea that preventative medicine mutated into." 💯% This needs to be repeated, a lot.
I think the reason it gained so much traction is that it works a treat for capitalism. "You're not feeling well?" "Rubbish. Get your lazy arse into work, or we'll find someone else to do your job." And then, of course, if you are unemployed, that's a character flaw, too.
Struggling with this rn, the way the dismissal messed with my mental health I’m just barely starting to understand. I worry the only way I’ll be diagnosed is through autopsy.
45 years of cardiac symptoms being written off as psychosomatic attention seeking only for a contrast CT - to show me how blocked up my coronary arteries were to push me to take statins, turns out my coronary arteries are pristine with only one having a calcium rating of 3 and anything under 100 isn't considered worth worrying about - to make an "incidental finding" of LVD.
LVD being an aneurysm in your heart.
And, now the doctors say they're not going to bother to do anything about it.
Um, guys, I'd kinda like to be able to do stuff without all the cardiac symptoms
Lawsuit territory. That's medical malpractice. An aneurysm can rupture at any time, and you'd be dead before they could do anything about it.
Make them say why they won't treat it, in writing, and sign it. See if that will make them change their minds. If not, request your records, and find a lawyer!
I will NEVER forget the pain I had after giving birth for my 2nd child. The cramps were so bad that I was bent in half crying. Delivery didn't hurt as much as afterwards. When I asked for something (the cramps triggered my fibromyalgia and my entire body decided to cramp in stupid areas like my back and neck) I was told that I wasn't really in pain. I just thought I was....yeah....no. It hurt. I hurt. Big owies and I needed help so they gave me overpriced Tylenol.
My personal favorite is: The reason ovarian cancer is so deadly is because, by the time they had symptoms, it's stage 4. Totally untrue. It should read, by the time the woman has finally made herself heard--it's too late. Ovarian cancer typically causes pain & cramping & rarely bleeding. If you have the misfortune of having a male gynecologist and you're still having a period, he will dismiss your concerns until you are mostly dead.
I think for starters you guys need to stop watching House M.D. and start trusting your patients: not everybody lies.
Also, you don't have to pretend to be omniscient, you probably can say something like "I don't know what's wrong with you yet but we can get there by this and that...".
I had a patient who wasn't getting adequate pain management for 2 DAYS. And usually I have respect for male nurses, but sad to say she had male nurses for those 2 days. I get report, and the (male) night nurse tells me, "She's been on her call light all night to get repositioned and apparently was a handful yesterday as well." Well DUH! Nobody thought to increase the dose of her pain medication. I get a new order from the doctor and "suddenly" the patient is actually mobilizing and not ringing every hour for repositioning. And she was able to get discharged the next day 🤯🤯 Effective pain management for women...what a concept.
Dr. Karan, thank you for sharing this video! 😊 More awareness needs to be spread on this subject. It definitely feels as though women get the short end of the stick when it comes to getting diagnoses and finding out root issues to their ailments. I am one of those women. It took 21 long years to find out i had endometriosis. Not to mention 4 to 5 years to find out i have Sjogrens and Fibromyalgia. Have gone years and years with being gaslit by doctors, being told the pain is all in my head or not real, being told i am being dramatic about my pain or a hypochondriac. It's defeating dealing with any doctors in my area, I feel there are so many doctors around me that never get to the root of the medical issues, and they just throw medication at you instead of figuring out what is really going on. I always feel like I am on my own when it comes to dealing with my ailments and health issues.
I’m so happy you’re talking about this stuff, Dr. Karan.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for advocating for us, Dr. Karan, cause we're trying and it's still too often dismissed. 😢 Endometriosis patient here. I needed to consult a second surgeon cause the first didn't listen to what I needed or why. I'm neurodiverse. I struggled to even get this diagnosed.
When he not just refused my treatment choice but also said no ones is gonna help me in that way, I had the so far worst day of my life (that's saying A LOT) and to this day I'm surprised I survived it (thanks, ADHD executive dysfunction, I guess?).
I then had "good luck in the midst of bad luck". Randomly asked our local hospital. Kindest surgeon ever. We're in touch. I had complications n not only were they nothing against endometriosis, actually having a genuinely kind surgeon on my team made all the psychological difference! Wouldn't have made it through half as well even had the other one taken my case.
In my experience, it was even worse as a little girl.
Yes, the famous, "children won't remember it". They do and they get PTSD. There was a study that showed that, no shit, Sherlock, if children are given pain relief after coronary surgery, _the survival rate improves._ It makes me very angry.