How Medicine Has Failed Women Over Time

Are women and men treated the same when they go to the doctor? Historically no. Elinor Cleghorn discusses how her diagnosis with lupus led to her researching why women are treated differently when they go to the doctor. Elinor says that her pain was frequently dismissed or attributed to something else, and that it took years to come to the proper diagnosis.

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Elinor Cleghorn: So in 2010 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called lupus and it's a disease that affects 90 more women and people born female than men. And i was diagnosed with it after I developed a life-threatening heart condition and was rushed to the emergency room the heart condition was very mysterious, and I just had my second baby who also coincidentally had a heart condition while I was pregnant. And it turned out that both of these conditions were being caused by my own immune system which was mounting in response and actually attacking the function of first my unborn baby's heart and secondly my heart. So I was given a diagnosis by a rheumatologist who's a specialist in autoimmune diseases and really knows how to kind of piece through all the symptoms and what kind of blood work to ask for. But generally speaking, there's not a lot of knowledge of consistent knowledge in general medical practice about autoimmunity and how to diagnose it. Lupus ordinarily takes between four and six years to be conclusively diagnosed. So in this respect from when I first got really sick to when I was diagnosed, it was pretty fast but actually for about seven years before my diagnosis I'd been having what I now know is the characteristic symptoms of lupus. So these include joint pain, migraines, photosensitivity, so sensitivity to sunlight, mental health issues. I think associated with being in a lot of pain. And whenever I went to the doctor invariably I was dismissed as either being anxious or hormonal or one doctor suggested I might be pregnant and not realize it. Another tried to diagnose me with gout. And this kind of went on and on this just general sort of disbelief diminishment dismissal of my pain. So I mean really I had an underlying disease but I was never referred for any diagnostic tests the pain was never taken seriously enough to be seen as an indicator of something else that was going on. And so the book really came from a realization that this experience I'd had was a profoundly gendered one. And I started to look through medicine's history as a way to sort of coming to terms with, not just my illness, but also the lack of kind of understanding around what autoimmunity is, why it affects more women than men, you know why it's so unpredictable. I was a history researcher at the time that i was diagnosed looking into feminist histories of art. So this was kind of my impulse anyway to look back to try and understand where we are now. And i came across all these women in case of studies textbooks you know across the annals of medicine over you know a century two centuries three centuries, and there was something so familiar in their experiences that i thought well okay you know medical science has progressed exponentially you know but yet our medical attitudes towards women's bodies. Especially towards women's pain especially towards illness symptoms that aren't maybe immediately diagnosable hasn't really moved on much at all. So that was really the impetus for me to tell this story of why a woman like me and you know thousands hundreds of thousands possibly millions of others were experiencing you know sort of degrees of medical neglect degrees of medical mistreatment. And i just wanted to really go back to the beginning of medical history and sort of build this story of how we got to where we are today.