Meanwhile, men are accorded fewer visits at doctors (GP) in UK. 32% fewer visits compared to women: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/8/e003320 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8588686.stm When I go to the GP she makes me feel like I'm intruding and wasting her time, like you're a man in your 20s, nothing could be wrong..
Maybe get a better GP? Seriously, I've never encountered this attitude. Doctors seem to be generally fairly clinical and professional.
Suppose for the sake of argument that on average women have higher rates of thinking something is physically wrong with them when there isn't. Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly?
Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly? Not without having very detailed information on exactly how big the difference is and, equally important, how these differences are distributed within each sub-population.
Not sexist: "Women on average have a higher rate of mood disorders." Sexist: "I'm going to be more skeptical of this particular woman's experience because she's a woman and probably is just hysterical."
Suppose for the sake of argument that on average women have higher rates of thinking something is physically wrong with them when there isn't. Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly?
Bayesian reasoning is a terrible fit for healthcare because it ignores risks.
Suppose 99% of the time a set of symptoms is harmless and 1% of the time it's deadly. A 1% risk of death is extremely high and needs to be taken seriously even if ignoring it would be correct 99% of the time.
Meanwhile, men are accorded fewer visits at doctors (GP) in UK. 32% fewer visits compared to women: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/8/e003320 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8588686.stm When I go to the GP she makes me feel like I'm intruding and wasting her time, like you're a man in your 20s, nothing could be wrong..
That men don't go to the doctor as much as they should, and do more visits if they are married is well established.
Are you claiming that this fact is explained by the doctors actions and not by the gender norm that men should just bear with minor illness?
> ...it took another few years to find another set of doctors who would take her symptoms seriously. “I had a lot of, ‘You’re just hysterical,’ ” she remembers. “One of the more common things, especially in emergency rooms, was ‘You’re just drug seeking.’” > As a woman of colour, Jackie was facing more than gender bias. A friend of mine (black, female) was shooed away by doctors as "drug seeking" and later told she h…
If your friend, like you, had received a powerful narcotic painkiller instead of a diagnosis, might the painkillers have covered up her symptoms and caused her tumors to go unnoticed longer?
I'm very skeptical of the medical industry. Modern medical science is fantastic stuff but as an industry there is something seriously wrong. I think they over-prescribe painkillers on a scale few people would find believable. It's disappointing they aren't applying the skepticism your friend received universally across the board. It would do a lot of good if they did.
It’s not clear if gender bias is the right word given that it’s such a loaded term. Women visit doctors more frequently and as the article states have higher rates of mood disorders. Given this, it seems obviously that misdiagnosis would be higher in women than men. It falls out of the Baysean statistics. If AI we’re doing the evaluation you could remove the gender parameter, but it could lead to even more frequent misdiagnoses. Alternatively we could be more exhaustive with diagnosing women but at what cost to the healthcare system? But then wouldn’t we be biasing against men? There is no free lunch here.
Suppose for the sake of argument that on average women have higher rates of thinking something is physically wrong with them when there isn't. Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly?
Rational, yes; fair, no. Group differences are real, and burying or ignoring that truth is doomed to failure, since it is obvious. However, we have a moral responsibility to evaluate every person as an individual - to give each the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how people who look like them tend to behave. I myself think this is a two way street. If you belong to a group with a particular characteristic and you…
Unfortunately there is another dimension here which is that we're allocating a scarce resource (medical care). If one group has significantly higher rates of hypocondria (again, I don't know for sure whether this is true, but assume for argument's sake that it is), and we're forced to treat everyone as an individual (i.e. ignore this fact), then this necessarily deprives other groups of resources (medical care).
Meanwhile, men are accorded fewer visits at doctors (GP) in UK. 32% fewer visits compared to women: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/8/e003320 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8588686.stm When I go to the GP she makes me feel like I'm intruding and wasting her time, like you're a man in your 20s, nothing could be wrong..
Maybe get a better GP? Seriously, I've never encountered this attitude. Doctors seem to be generally fairly clinical and professional.
In my experience it's not the doctors, who without exception have always been pretty good - but the clerical / reception staff. I've rarely been made to feel so unwelcome anywhere else.
It's gotten to the point where I just stump up the cash and go private, although now I feel things have gotten better with the introduction of app based consultations via the NHS, which I'm registered for but haven't needed to try out yet.
Let's not perpetuate more of the bias and sexism that the article is talking about.
Sex differences in the genetic sense exist, and are founded on physics, chemistry and biology. Let's not hide from them either, veiled behind ideological double-speak. Balance.
Which of those really exist though?
I fully agree they exist, but it is very hard to separate which are just culture from those that are real differences. You can measure hormone differences of course, and there are other measurable things, but you quickly get into measurable differences but no idea if they are nature or nurture.
Suppose for the sake of argument that on average women have higher rates of thinking something is physically wrong with them when there isn't. Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly?
Bayesian reasoning is a terrible fit for healthcare because it ignores risks. Suppose 99% of the time a set of symptoms is harmless and 1% of the time it's deadly. A 1% risk of death is extremely high and needs to be taken seriously even if ignoring it would be correct 99% of the time.
This exact case is discussed in Eliezer Yudkowsky's "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem" [0].