When I first packed my life into the back of my tiny car and moved to Sydney for uni, I left behind the doctor I’d been seeing for years. Finding a new one seemed like one of the least daunting parts of moving, but oh man was I wrong.
My very first crack at finding a new doctor found me in the office of an ancient man who sighed sadly and said “I thought you were a good girl” when I asked to renew the script for my birth control.
The next time I tried to renew the script a few months later, a different doctor lectured me on “boy germs”, meaning STIs.
Once I was sent home from an appointment and told to come back the next day, because the doctor was running really late and wasn’t totally sure what was going on with me.
It was easier to find a mechanic that didn’t speak to me like an idiot than a doctor, and I know infinitely more about my own body than I do about cars.
It’s Women’s Health Week from September 2 to 6, and the two biggest causes of women not working to stay healthy are “lack of time” and “health not being a priority”. I’d argue that health is absolutely a priority for women, we just aren’t taken as seriously as men by a lot of health professionals.
Did you know that in the emergency room, women are less likely to be given the super effective opioid type of pain killers? Speaking of pain killers, did you know that 70% of chronic pain sufferers are women, but 80% of pain meds are tested in clinical trials made up exclusively of men? Of course, women weren’t included in a lot of clinical trials until 1999 when the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia updated their rulebook saying trials couldn’t discriminate by sex.
Out on the street, if a woman has a heart attack in public she’s less likely to get CPR from a bystander. The overwhelming majority of CPR practice dummies are male, so people get worried about performing it on someone with breasts.
There are so many examples of women getting garbage, sexist health care, but the award for the most wildly messed up thing that I’ve ever heard has to go to the husband stitch. When a doctor is stitching up a woman who has torn during childbirth, a husband stitch is an extra stitch given to make her “tighter” and therefore more pleasurable to her partner. Mostly this just makes life hell for the woman who can’t have sex without excruciating pain anymore. But hey, why think about that when you could make life a teeny tiny bit better for a dude!
These statistics are true for all women, but things get even more grim once you add being LGBTI, Indigenous, disabled, or from a non-English speaking background into the mix. Indigenous women have significantly worse pregnancies than white women, lesbian and bisexual women recover worse from cancer treatments than straight women, and disabled women are almost seven times more likely than able bodied men to have unmet health needs due to the cost of medication.
Dr Janine Austin Clayton, the director of the US Office of Research on Women’s Health, said to the New York Times in 2014 that the reason for all this madness is that “we literally know less about every aspect of female biology compared to male biology”. Women shouldn’t have something as important as health care thrown in the too hard basket, damnit. As with anything however, the first step is admitting we have a problem.