As a women in her mid 40’s I do feel that any symptom of anything I may have is now just chalked up to the perimenopause.
This is what my online life tells me…and what my friends of the same age often hear from their GPs.
But women in their 40’s can have other medical conditions, including pregnancy and cancer.
We need to be heard properly.
‘A Mumsnet report drawing on a decade of users’ posts from the site paints a picture of a system where women fail to get the healthcare they need, with symptoms “brushed aside, treated as psychological, or simply not believed”; in a survey published with the report, 64% said they had been explicitly told pain or symptoms were “normal” or “in their head”.’
There are a lot of pains and symptoms in women that get missed by the medical profession because so many studies have been men only.
I didn’t really get a scale of this until I read ‘Invisible Women’ by Caroline Criado Perez.
Strong recommend if you have not read already.
This New Scientist article looks at some of the conditions and scenarios that can be missed from assuming every symptom is the perimenopause / menopause once you reach a certain age.
The assumption is that once you have a face to face consultation with your GP all will be well…but detecting other conditions may require several trips and trying HRT.
Back in my 20s in school it was "Are you pregnant?" even if you walked in saying your knee is hurting. So I learned to be persistent pretty early.
Up to the age of 40 there is an assumption in doctors waiting rooms that you are there either because of an STD or pregnancy.
Heh.
There is one thing for which being pregnant is very useful: getting your teeth straightened. My orthodontist cousin tells me that teeth are much more mobile during pregnancy, and his pregnant patients have straight teeth in no time. I never did need it, but sometimes advise young women – and always get a rise out of them 😆
"In some cases, women are skipping these important in-person evaluations entirely, going straight to telemedicine providers and requesting hormone replacement therapies (HRT) for their health issues."
It's not women skipping in-person evaluations, at least in the UK, it's the fact that a telephone appointment is the first thing you get and you have to persuade the doctor to see you in-person.
I agree, women are trying to get whatever appointment they can with their GP. Delays in getting seen, can lead to them seeking out other ‘wellness solutions’ but I would be surprised if it led directly to seeking out private HRT via just a phone consultation…but with the creeping privatisation of healthcare in the UK I wouldn’t entirely dismiss anything these days.
It is possibly one of the most depressing books to read as a woman…and it makes you realise how far we still need to go in terms of the playing field for our existence being anywhere near equal.
But acknowledging the way everything has been designed and researched around the ‘average man’ for decades because women are ‘too random and complicated’ needs to be said out loud.
I read Mary Beard’s Women and Power around roughly the same time if memory serves me right. Good reading companions!
@JugglingWithEggs In case you haven’t come across it… Another good read along these lines is Maya Dusenbury’s “Doing Harm”. Subtitle: how bad medicine and lazy science leave women dismissed, misdiagnosed, and sick.
IOW, a book specifically about “how women suffer because the medical community knows relatively less about their diseases and bodies and too often doesn't trust their reports of their symptoms”. Published nearly a decade ago but sadly still topical.
This does worry me. I remember going to hear neurologist Professor Gina Rippon speak about the differences in how the female brain is perceived and researched a few years back. She managed to convey a complex subject in a really accessible way…and the misogyny she had encountered was bad. Trying to currently get back into her new book The Lost Girls of Autism which again tells of how girls/women were just ignored and brushed out of the medical literature on autism.
I think I’ve generally been quite lucky on this front, but I have had friends who have suffered for years from their teens onwards. I had an elderly neighbour who confided in me how much she had suffered all her adult life and eventually had cancer, that was eventually caught…but she wishes she had been taken more seriously earlier, because of the extent of the surgery and chemo she had to have.
I think the sex education we received in school was very mechanical and focused on avoiding pregnancy, with precious little about how girls might find this monthly change to their existence or how they could communicate their worries and concerns. It amounted to ‘suck it up’.
I couldn’t believe how lucky I felt the first time my partner offered to go out and buy sanitary products for me and didn’t make anything of it. A sign he was a keeper!
I think in the UK at least there is a notion that testing is expensive…and an assumption that most symptoms go away in a couple of weeks, so in the first instance most people (particularly women) are told to go away and only come back if the pain continues. Many just then suffer in silence or do go back, but have to be very persistent in an unBritish way to be heard.
I’ve had more than one GP miss (fortunately) readily solved issues because they’ve initially put the problem down to ‘stress’.
I know my own body and know when something needs investigating albeit there is ‘stress’ in my life. (They’re aware of my caring responsibilities.) It’s too easy to dismiss someone rather than accept a person knows their own ‘normal’.
For example, it took 3 visits before a blood test was ordered showing my B12 was extremely low. I had to have injections every other day for 2 weeks and now have an injection every 12 weeks. (Not convinced that interval is adequate actually but that’s a different argument.)
I think ‘stress’ is another reason that a lot of symptoms get put down to for women in a way that perhaps it’s not for men. The offer of antidepressants for women with neurodivergent kids seems anecdotally high to me.
I agree, we know our own bodies and what stress does to them…but equally what feels outside of that range.
It shouldn’t feel radical to say we should all have bodily autonomy in 2026 in the UK. We all have different preferences and needs. And GPs should be respecting that in a way that shows they are genuinely listening. I would also argue that my mum suffered a lot of confusion around when the menopause hit for her from having a coil fitted.
Is there currently a country anywhere that treats women’s medical concerns as seriously as men’s?
Yes, just ignore it until it goes away. Which is how my mother died of cancer at 45.
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