With all of the recent rollbacks the Trump administration has made regarding healthcare for women, it’s pretty clear that sexism is still present in the White House. But what may not be as well known is the sexism still embedded in medicine today. In a recent article from Marie Claire titled “Women Are Dying Because Doctors Treat Us Like Men”, the author uses a woman’s heartbreaking and harrowing medical story to prove that medicine can be sexist, too.
Starr Mirza, the focus of the Marie Claire article, describes how she spent over a decade dealing with fainting spells before cardiac arrest at age 23 prompted a diagnosis. Why did it take so long to figure out what was wrong with Mirza? Because her doctors refused to take her seriously. “I remember it like it was yesterday—I walked in, and right away, I got the eye-rolling,” Mirza recalls. “They were trying to say, ‘Look, she’s doing this for attention.'”
After being sent home by the first doctor, her parents took her to get a second opinion, and a third. “By the time we got to the fourth doctor,” Mirza says, “they were repeatedly saying, ‘This is not our problem. You can take her to a psychiatrist and they will deal with her.'” For the next 10 years, Mirza catered her life around her mysterious illness, dropping out of sports and taking multiple naps a day, until one day, in 2002, her heart stopped beating and she ended up in the hospital. They eventually diagnosed her with long QT syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder that causes chaotic heartbeats, fainting spells, and sometimes sudden death. This diagnosis would have been terrifying for anyone– but for Mirza, it was a relief. “I started laughing,” she says, “because, for 10 years, I knew something was wrong, and finally I was validated.”
Studies have shown over and over again that cases like Mirza’s are extremely common. Women are more likely than men to be misdiagnosed, not taken seriously, and told that their symptoms are psychosomatic. The term “Yentl syndrome” was coined in 1991 by the first female head of the National Institute of Health (NIH) to describe the common notion that women have to prove they are as sick as men or have to mirror their symptoms to receive the same level of care. In 2000, a study found that women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home mid-heart-attack, even though heart disease is the number-one killer of women.
The biggest issue is that medicine views men and women as the same, even though they are obviously very different biologically. Women’s health used to be called “bikini medicine”, due to the belief that the only thing that distinguished women from men were the body parts that could be covered with a bikini. Research has overwhelmingly been done on male patients/cells/mice, completely disregarding the different ways the variable being tested could affect women. Luckily, NIH is working to combat this problem by mandating the funding applicants to include female human subjects in research trials, as well as study both sexes of animals and cells as well, or include a “strong justification” for why they are not. And with NIH funding $33 billion a year in research, this is huge.
But with medicine’s slow pace, it is likely that major advancements in healthcare for women will take decades to come about. So until then, women must be their own biggest advocates. Ask your doctors whether the medicine they are recommending has been tested on women. Don’t let your symptoms be ignored. Take control of your own health and well-being, because as of now, we can’t trust the male-dominant field of medicine to have our backs.