‘All in Her Head’: A Doctor Reckons With Sexism in Women’s Health Care – The New York Times
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A brand new guide explores the historical past of discrimination in girls’s well being care and the way it impacts analysis and remedy as we speak.
Six years in the past, Dr. Elizabeth Comen, a breast most cancers specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in Manhattan, held the hand of a affected person who was hours from demise.
As Dr. Comen leaned in for a ultimate goodbye, she pressed her cheek to her affected person’s damp face. “Then she mentioned it,” Dr. Comen recalled.
“‘I’m so sorry for sweating on you.’”
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In her 20 years as a doctor, Dr. Comen has discovered that girls are continuously apologizing to her: for sweating, for asking follow-up questions, for failing to detect their very own cancers sooner.
“Girls apologize for being sick or looking for care or advocating for themselves,” she mentioned throughout an interview in her workplace: “‘I’m so sorry, however I’m in ache. I’m so sorry, this seems to be disgusting.’”
These experiences within the examination room are a part of what drove Dr. Comen to jot down “All in Her Head: The Reality and Lies Early Medication Taught Us About Girls’s Our bodies and Why It Issues In the present day.” In it, she traces the roots of ladies’s tendency to apologize for his or her ailing or unruly our bodies to centuries of diminishment by the medical institution. It’s a legacy that continues to form the lives of ladies sufferers, she argues.
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