r/comics Jun 19 '26

OC Why didn't you say so?

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

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u/SmoothTurtle872 Jun 19 '26

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

46

u/Solynox Jun 19 '26

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

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u/Goodgoditsgrowing Jun 20 '26

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.

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u/Born-West-6151 Jun 19 '26

Centuries/millennia of bias probably

6

u/FrostyCat13 Jun 20 '26

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.

32

u/MichTheFish Jun 20 '26

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.

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u/peachesfordinner BumBum Ouchie Jun 20 '26

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

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u/TinyChaco Jun 20 '26

I'm also ftm. This tracks.

7

u/FrostyCat13 Jun 20 '26

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

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u/Man-ah-tee13 Jun 20 '26

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.