Yet another of these whines, whinges, that medicine doesn’t understand women’s bodies. This all being a patriarchal, no doubt capitalist, oppression of women.
Well, no, not really. Historically dissection was only carried out on the cadavers of executed criminals. Very many fewer women were so killed in a manner that allowed such than men. Burning at the stake, for example, doesn’t leave much to examine. Hanging does.
In more modern times we tend not to test out drugs on women. Those we do test them on tend to be impoverished students who are willing to take a risk for some cash. Men do that more than women do, take risks for cash, as workplace fatality numbers show us. Further, there’s considerable ethical difficulty in testing drugs on a woman who may be pregnant.
That less is known about female bits is entirely true but it’s not oppression that has made it so.
Of course, we can move from this obviousness to the entirely lala:
Nobody suggests that endometriosis is not a real disease, or is somehow imagined, but there is a general feeling in medicine that women’s reaction to having endometriosis is somehow hysterical, especially when symptoms prevail after treatment has been offered, which is common.
Endometriosis is when the endometrium – the lining of the womb – turns up in places where it’s not the lining of the womb. The only cure anyone’s really got is to remove such vagrant flesh – to do what we’d call a hysterectomy if it were where it is supposed to be. That is, endometriosis is the actual definition of a disease which is hysterical:
adjective
adjective: hysteric
another term for hysterical (sense 2).
Originmid 17th century (as an adjective): via Latin from Greek husterikos ‘of the womb’, from hustera ‘womb’ (hysteria being thought to be specific to women and associated with the womb).
Science. Sometime we really ought to allow women to attend courses in it.
If the ladies doing the complaining should decide to volunteer for ‘Girls for Guinea Pigs’, with Dr Mengele as their patron saint and the motto ‘You too can be a gypsy girl’, I’d be happy to support them. But alas they seem to feel that the wicked white patriarchy should round up some (other) females and conduct the experiments they need to improve their health. As one of the wicked white patriarchs, I’m too cowardly to confront the howling harridans who’d go straight for my throat if I ever tried this. So I’ll just keep my head down and my… Read more »
It’s strange that women are roughly half of the doctor population and in the majority in medical research and yet they couldn’t be bothered to look into the mechanics of their own sex. Even stranger given that women, owing to their complicated insides, are by far the bigger users of prescription drugs. Sounds like there’s a lot of overlooked profit just waiting to be made… nahhh.