Why didn't you say so?

[u/TheNectarineDiaries]

Best medical advice I ever got was to bring a man to your appointments

[u/the-effects-of-Dust]

I went to the emergency room after experiencing abdominal pain in my lower right quadrant for a full 24 hours. I remember thinking “I without a shadow of a doubt know this is appendicitis.” (Surprisingly it didn’t hurt as much as I thought but I also have endometriosis so like — pain tolerance is weird for me) ANYWAY
Triage nurse told me it couldn’t be appendicitis because I didn’t have a fever. I had to demand a ct scan or whatever they used to diagnose that and had to cry and talk to a doctor before they would.

Anyway my appendix had not exploded yet but had split open and was leaking pus into my abdominal cavity and if they sent me home I would have likely died 😇 (so said my surgeon after I came to the next morning).

Edit: I forgot to add my favorite part! I had pretty good health insurance at the time (like, US standards…so…) but I went to a hospital out of network so I was initially billed $28,000 for my surgery! My surgeon had to argue the insurance company down because “it was literally a life or death emergency” so they brought it down to $3,000. Which I still haven’t paid. Because poverty. 😇

[u/Lycaon-Ur → u/the-effects-of-Dust]

I was (casually) dating a girl who was in your situation but who was told it was IBS and was sent home. She left behind 2 kids.

[u/Chrispeefeart → u/Lycaon-Ur]

I wonder how many children have been orphaned because doctors wouldn't take women seriously

[u/SmoothTurtle872 → u/[deleted]]

All of my female friends have complained about this, like it's clearly a massive problem.

[u/Solynox → u/SmoothTurtle872]

Genuinely wtf is being taught in medical school for physicians to consistently downplay womens symptoms?

[u/Goodgoditsgrowing → u/Solynox]

I mean until recently they didn’t even have to test drugs in women to get fda clearance, because women’s pesky hormones were seen as complicating the data set. That’s how birth control ended up causing heart attacks. And the same concept is why women’s heart attacks are dismissed as atypical - because they aren’t “normal” like a man’s heart attack with its “normal” symptoms….. women are an obstacle to be excised in medicine, an anomaly or outlier to ignore, terribly weird and always abnormal.

[u/Born-West-6151 → u/Solynox]

Centuries/millennia of bias probably

[u/FrostyCat13 → u/Solynox]

As someone else said, until very recently, medical research was done exclusively on males since it was "easier since it's the same without pesky hormones". There's also still some teachers and/or textbooks which states women have a higher tolerance to pain yet at the same time also say women are more likely to complain over nothing and there's also racism in there since there's a lot of "black people are more resistant to pain" and other unproven bullshit.

It's a lot of old misogyny and racism that's been baked into the medical field for centuries and it's hard to get rid of.

[u/MichTheFish → u/SmoothTurtle872]

As someone chronically ill who transitioned from being read as a woman to being read as a man, I can personally vouch that I'm taken much more seriously by urgent care and er docs now than I did when I was a female teenager and young adult.

[u/peachesfordinner → u/MichTheFish]

I've heard this from a lot of ftm. Truly a good data set

[u/TinyChaco → u/MichTheFish]

I'm also ftm. This tracks.

[u/FrostyCat13 → u/MichTheFish]

And I'm MTF and I can attest to the opposite, went from being taken seriously by doctors to easily being dismissed.

[u/Man-ah-tee13 → u/SmoothTurtle872]

I'm a pancreatic patient, have been for over a decade. Had a flare up. Went to the ER like I'm supposed to, and was told by a doctor that "my mother has pancreatic flare ups and she just treats them at home with bowel rest and meds." Got sent home. The next day I'm back and hospitalized for 8 days. Some of these "doctors" are a freaking joke.