Doc, is it serious?

Galen, one of the first anti-woman
propagandists in the medical field

A few months ago, I heard a radio interview with Joe Fassler, a regular contributor to The Atlantic, in which he relayed an absolutely horrifying experiencing his wife was subjected to when she went to the ER in excruciating pain.  I won't re-hash it all here, but you can read the full piece if you're in the mood to become incredibly upset.  It affected me significantly; I would say that it was one of the primary motivators that drove me to choose an exploration of patriarchy as TFP's first month-long deep dive.

Today we discuss a few of the ways patriarchy infiltrates the medical field.  It's an incredibly potent illustration for anyone who, like me, can be uncontroversially labeled with the white male identity.  If you share that identity with me but you don't understand what other people are irritated about, what the 'feminazis' are so upset about, now that we're all equal and all, then read on.  Hopefully you'll discover just how much easier your life has been because you were lucky enough to be born into the presumptively 'normal' identity group.

Worms and Snails versus Sugar and Spice

It's been pretty thoroughly established: male and female bodies differ quite significantly.  These differences extend beyond the obvious sexual anatomical distinctions to thousands of more subtle differences that manifest in essentially every major biological system.  This truism might not seem like a big deal until one recalls the fact that since white men have had almost exclusive dominance over all major cultural institutions on the developed world until the last half century or so.  Long story short: in countless situations, decisions are made that privilege male biology over female biology.

Sometimes these choices only result in minor, nuissance-level irritations.  One example that hit the mainstream last year was the revelation that thermostats in most offices were calibrated to suit the metabolism of middle-aged men, which would explain why women are so often uncomfortably (or even unbearably) cold in offices and schools.

Sometimes the consequences are more severe.  For instance, heart attacks often have extremely different symptoms in males and females (in addition to chest pain and left-side numbness/weakness, women frequently and intensely experience shortness of breath and nausea/vomiting).  Most people aren't aware of these differences, which leaves many more heart attacks in women undiagnosed.  Given that cardiac disease is the number one killer among women in the developed world, I'd say that the costs of male-normed medical knowledge are significant for those born without penises.

He's a doctor, he knows what he's doing

The absurdity of the entire situation becomes even more dramatic when one discovers that even highly trained medical professionals demonstrate and reinforce the prioritization and normalization of the male body at the expense of the female.  The anatomy textbooks they study in medical school prime them to defend this bias; the educational and reference materials use images and illustrations of (white) male anatomy at a rate three times higher than female anatomy for biological features that exists in both males and females.  Three times!  Imagine the normative effect this embeds in these doctors minds, if only on a subliminal level.  Worse still, much of the data and treatment information included in the texts is only appropriate for male patients, with no instructions on how to adjust for females - things like dosage recommendations for medications, for instance.

You might think that the extremely intelligent people that choose to become doctors aren't phased by this stuff, that they can treats patients objectively and effectively irrespective of sex.  You'd be wrong.  One of the most soul-crushing angles that Mr. Fassler's piece in The Atlantic explores is the ways in which declarations of pain are treated differently depending on whether they come from men or women.  The fact is that men's pain is taken more seriously, and women's pain is often dismissed.  Women are expected to prove that they're sick and in need of care, while doctors will take the pleas of help coming from male patients for granted.  There have been cases of women seeking medical care while suffering from physically real and excruciating pain, and instead being treated for hysteria or other mental illnesses (the term hysteria actually originates from ancient Greek medical texts; women were said to suffer from it when their uterus was drifting around their body causing trouble.  The preferred cure was to weigh the darn thing down with a baby to keep it from wandering off).

I don't really know where else to go with this, except to exhort anyone who's convinced that we live in a totally equal society where everyone gets the same chances to think long and hard about that assumption.  Chances are you only feel that way because you don't have as much horrible shit to deal with by virtue of your fortunate chromosomes.