T keep us in pain
Jackson says she still suffered fatigue, back and hip pain, and pain in the front of her leg ‘put down to a skiing accident’. Her upset stomach was written off as irritable bowel syndrome.
‘For 15 years, I thought of myself as a weak person and a hypochondriac until
I went to an endometriosis conference aged 38,’ she says. ‘All the specialists from Australia were there and I can’t tell you how much I cried realising everything I’d been feeling was linked to this condition. I wasn’t a hypochondriac. I went to work the next day at the Sydney office of The Guardian and told my boss I had to write about it.’
This was 2015 and Jackson’s story kickstarted an investigation by the newspaper into the disease. Women worldwide wrote in their hundreds to tell how they too had been ‘fobbed off’ by the medical establishment. Lena Dunham and Padma Lakshmi have since spoken out about it.
What Jackson details in her book is how women are – historically, and to the present day – under-served by the systems that should keep us healthy, happy and informed about our bodies. It’s a problem magnified hugely for women of colour.
Take abdominal pain. A 2008 US study quoted in The Atlantic found women have to wait on average 16 minutes longer than male patients to see an A&E doctor for stomach pain. When seen, women were 13 to 25 per cent less likely to receive painkillers – a figure that reduced further if the women weren’t white. A 2014 Swedish study found similar results.
A series in The Lancet this year acknowledged the issue. ‘Because women are stereotyped as fragile and overemotional, women’s health-related complaints are very often interpreted as exaggerated and women’s physical symptoms are attributed to psychosomatic rather than physical causes,’ say the series’ authors. ‘Women frequently receive inferior care to men, are screened for disease less often, and receive less aggressive treatment and substandard follow-up.’
A 2018 study by Leeds University showed women had a 50 per cent higher chance of receiving the wrong initial diagnosis (panic attacks or indigestion).
Jackson says that while most doctors aren’t sexist, the establishment suffers from ‘structural sexism’.
‘I spoke to a few male doctors while researching this book who said they’d never really thought about this issue before,’ she says. ‘The vast majority of medical professionals want to help their patients but there is an education issue. Raising awareness of these things is going to help.’
Activist and author Caroline Criado Perez has also called for transparency of data around medical trials (see box top left), properly separating information by sex. Are we about to see the rise of health’s gender revolution? If so, it’s not come a moment too soon.
‘For 15 years, I thought of myself as weak and a hypochondriac’
Pain And Prejudice: A Call To Arms For Women And Their Bodies by Gabrielle Jackson (Piatkus) is out now