Women say doctors don't believe them when they're in pain, sick or dying. Is there a way to fix it?
CBC
Allison McCabe's own story of medical dismissal began last August with a trip to an emergency room in Vancouver.
"I was shaking violently, was having trouble thinking, speaking, and walking, and felt such a deep sense of my impending death I actually texted my mom I loved her just in case I did die," McCabe wrote in an email to CBC News last week.
"The doctor actually laughed in my face and handed me an Advil saying, 'It's the flu, what do you want me to do?'"
McCabe, 31, says she didn't take no for an answer, fighting "tooth and nail to be taken seriously." She ended up having a life-threatening side effect of iron infusions called hypophosphatemia.
McCabe was one of hundreds of readers and viewers who spoke about their own experiences of being dismissed in a Canadian hospital after hearing about the ordeal of a Newfoundland woman who says her gangrenous appendix was repeatedly passed off as anxiety.
Comments on social media point to a common problem spanning decades and borders. Several dozen emails to CBC News explained those experiences in-depth. Many were women who shared concern that their symptoms were overlooked because of their gender.
Shannon Bell of Victoria said she was told she was too young and healthy to have heart problems, and was sent home from the hospital with opiate painkillers. Her family doctor later diagnosed her with a heart condition, using the same test results seen by physicians in the emergency room that wouldn't admit her.
"Women's health care is shocking at best," Bell wrote. "If you don't advocate relentlessly, which is unnecessary, you are brushed aside."
On social media, the stories continued.
"My 'anxiety' was actually complex partial seizures," wrote one TikTok user on the story posted by CBC News. Another user said their stomach pain was brushed off for three years as anxiety and constipation, but ended up being cancer.
"My doctor suspects undiagnosed endometriosis based on how I become bedridden during periods and … everything else that comes with it," one Reddit user wrote. "They did [an] ultrasound on me to see how it looked and they said everything looked fine."
Anecdotes like these don't solely abound online. Several books have been written on the subject, too. The author of one of them — Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain — told CBC News she had hoped the medical community had changed since her book came out in 2018.
Abby Norman, speaking from her home in Boston, said she was initially overwhelmed by the number of women contacting her to share their own experiences.
"The response was so intense and so disheartening," Norman said, adding she was "completely unprepared" for the onslaught of emails from women around the world, and even at one point took an online hiatus to recover.
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