Women are more likely to wait longer for a health diagnosis and to be told it’s ‘all in their heads’. That can be lethal: diagnostic errors cause 40,000-80,000 deaths in the US alone.

Brain tumours are only one example. A 2015 study revealed a longer lag time from the onset of symptoms to diagnosis in female patients in six out of 11 types of cancer. It isn’t that women wait longer to seek medical attention – the delay occurs after they’ve first visited their GP. A 2013 study concluded that more than twice as many women as men had to make more than three visits to a primary care doctor in the UK before getting referred to a specialist for suspected bladder cancer. So did nearly twice as many with renal cancer.  

Women have long been considered the typical patients with psychogenic symptoms, so it’s no wonder that they are especially likely to find their symptoms dismissed as “all in their heads”. In a 1986 study, for example, researchers looked at a group of patients with serious organic neurological disorders who’d initially been diagnosed with hysteria. They identified the characteristics that made a patient vulnerable to such a misdiagnosis. One was having a prior diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder. Another was being a woman.

But while women may truly have a higher risk, the difference in prevalence rates may be at least partly a consequence of overdiagnosis in women and underdiagnosis in men. Studies in the 1990s suggested that as many as 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression were misdiagnosed. Furthermore, depression and anxiety are themselves symptoms of other diseases, which often go unrecognised in women. And, of course, the stress of suffering from an undiagnosed – and therefore untreated – disease often takes its mental toll. As one article points out, “Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180523-how-gender-bias-affects-your-healthcare

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/California-Is-Now-Worlds-5th-Largest-Economy-Surpasses-UK-481770711.html

Hey, anyone remember when we passed that tax increase in 2009 to pay for infrastructure and everyone said it would tank our faltering economy? Oh, and looks like left coast liberals are some of the most productive workers in the world!