How gender bias affects healthcare
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Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#2Meanwhile, 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..
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#3Women are on average more neurotic than men, therefore physicians will be more skeptical of their claims; psychosomatic symptoms are more common for females.
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#4> ...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 had lyme disease, was even put on a treatment for it before someone listened carefully and discovered the gigantic tumors growing on her liver!
Meanwhile I (white, male) went in for a 2-week cough that was keeping me up at night. Never been to this office or met the doc before but was given a script for codeine (!!) after about 2 minutes in the exam room.
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#5Women are on average more neurotic than men, therefore physicians will be more skeptical of their claims; psychosomatic symptoms are more common for females.
Let's not perpetuate more of the bias and sexism that the article is talking about.
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#6Women are on average more neurotic than men, therefore physicians will be more skeptical of their claims; psychosomatic symptoms are more common for females.
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.
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#7Women are on average more neurotic than men, therefore physicians will be more skeptical of their claims; psychosomatic symptoms are more common for females.
Let's not perpetuate more of the bias and sexism that the article is talking about.
> A 2013 review found that groups associated with higher levels of neuroticism are young adults who are at high risk for mood disorders and women.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
Edit: this isn't to say that there isn't a bias... maybe doctors know this already, but assume that the effect is bigger than it is? Alternatively, they don't know this, and could treat their patients better if they had known. In any case, nothing good comes from denying the truth.
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#8Women are on average more neurotic than men, therefore physicians will be more skeptical of their claims; psychosomatic symptoms are more common for females.
Sounds like those particular doctors would have been better off doing statistics than working with human beings
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not perpetuate more of the bias and sexism that the article is talking about.
> A 2013 review found that groups associated with higher levels of neuroticism are young adults who are at high risk for mood disorders and women. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism Edit: this isn't to say that there isn't a bias... maybe doctors know this already, but assume that the effect is bigger than it is? Alternatively, they don't know this, and could treat their patients better if they had known.…
"Group X has a higher rate of Y" =/> "We should treat every member of X as if they have Y"
Re: How gender bias affects healthcare
#10So the way I see it, there's one of two (mostly useless) ways to eliminate gender bias.
The first is bias training, to get people to recognize and react to their implicit biases. You see one patient that is rude, non-compliant, etc, and you implicitly assume that patients that have the same features will act the same, and you act accordingly. This is usually within the context of racial bias ("the black patient isn't compliant, so all black patients must also not be compliant and thus I'll not give them the best care"). Not-so-fun-fact: most people hate going to these sort of training workshops (me included), and so I don't think these are very effective.
The second is having more women in healthcare. With cultural/racial/ethnic bias, we have seen a decrease in that bias when physicians of that culture/ethnicity are involved in that patient's care. Problem is, I don't believe this has worked all that well when applied to gender bias. You may argue that women are severely under-represented in areas of healthcare (surgery for example), and we should strive for there to be more female surgeons. However, look at obstetrics/gynecology in the US. We have a predominantly female workforce, and there's still bias against women during/after pregnancy. Look at how many patients presenting with symptoms of pre-eclampsia (leading to a potentially fatal condition HELLP) are missed or disregarded. What about the rates of pulmonary embolism after overlooked deep vein thrombosis symptoms post-childbirth?
The healthcare industry has in recent times made it hard to spend the time or resources needed to really "care" for a patient. Doctors have to keep their visits short to maintain their volume (and job), nurse shortages are prevalent, and everyone is overworked. I don't know if or when we're going to end up solving this problem, but maybe starting an honest conversation with colleagues will help.
Edit: changed some words for clarity.