vaspider:

thebibliosphere:

splinteredstar:

brutereason:

“Lurking behind all these stories of malpractice and missed diagnosis, from fibromyalgia to broken birth control, is the grim specter of hysteria — a mental illness, diagnosed mainly among women, in which emotional distress was said to convert into physical symptoms. In practice, “hysteria” was a catchall diagnosis for any number of mental or physical ailments. But it embodied a belief that still informs medical practice today: Women could believe they had symptoms, and they could even think themselves into manifesting those symptoms, not because they were sick, but because they were women, with all the emotional fragility and gullibility that supposedly implied.
To this day, when women say they don’t feel well, our first instinct is to wonder if they’re being melodramatic or acting out for attention. And in a dispute between a woman and a medical practitioner about her own experience, the medical practitioner is still automatically assumed to be in the right — even when we have a mounting pile of evidence that this isn’t always true and that the assumption harms and even kills female patients.”

— Believing Women Means Believing Their Pain – Member Feature Stories – Medium

@thebibliosphere you’ve dealt with this irrc?

Too often. From the ER doctor who prescribed me sleeping pills for chest pain/lack of oxygen, to the doctor who recently suggested the pain in my foot was stress and not the sliver visibly stuck under the skin.

And while many doctors don’t diagnose it as “hysteria” anymore, the term you need to watch out for is “conversion disorder” which is basically just the new terminology for hysteria, and is a catchall phrase for “we think you’re making this up so we’re not going to help you” and is actually what a lot of women are misdiagnosed as having, when they are actually developing MS (or other autoimmune dysfunctions). (source)

I’ve been so effectively gaslighted by the medical profession that this week when I started going into slow anaphylactic shock I dismissed it as “probably nothing” and tried to wait it out. The ER nurse was absolutely horrified. But the truth is I’ve been conditioned to believe I am “fine” and don’t need medical help. Even if and when my airways are closing, because I have been told in the past whilst having slow acting anaphylaxis, that it was “just nerves”.

The system is broken. Worse than that, it is currently designed to fail. And not enough is being done about it.

This is abuse. We need to start calling it what it is, and not just so those of us whose PTSD is triggered by it can ask for it to be tagged.

It’s abuse.