Are women and men receiving equally good care from their physicians? Not according to feminist writer Maya Dusenbery, author of the new book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick. Instead, she argues, the medical field is rife with gender disparities, leading to poorer outcomes for women.
Throughout history, women’s experiences have been overlooked or discounted in doctor’s offices—and in medical and scientific research, she writes. So where has that left us today? Diseases that disproportionately affect women—like autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia, and many chronic pain conditions—have been under-researched, leaving doctors without a clear understanding of how to recognize and treat them. And doctors dismiss the accounts of women patients too often, leading to a “trust gap” that affects women’s health care in disproportionately negative ways.
However, new insights are beginning to emerge showing how women’s well-being has been hampered by gender disparities. Dusenbery’s book, based on two years of research into a host of conditions, exposes the systemic causes of these disparities and provides critically relevant information for the public—and for those in medicine, psychology, and the research sciences.
[For more on this story by JENARA NERENBERG, go to https://greatergood.berkeley.e...ality_in_health_care]
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