Doing Harm
Books | Health & Fitness / Women's Health
4.3
(93)
Maya Dusenbery
Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with doctors and researchers, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today. In Doing Harm, Dusenbery explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women’s experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled “chronic complainers” for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to “normal” menstrual cramps, while still others have “contested” illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as “real” diseases by the whole of the profession.An eye-opening read for patients and health care providers alike, Doing Harm shows how women suffer because the medical community knows relatively less about their diseases and bodies and too often doesn’t trust their reports of their symptoms. The research community has neglected conditions that disproportionately affect women and paid little attention to biological differences between the sexes in everything from drug metabolism to the disease factors—even the symptoms of a heart attack. Meanwhile, a long history of viewing women as especially prone to “hysteria” reverberates to the present day, leaving women battling against a stereotype that they’re hypochondriacs whose ailments are likely to be “all in their heads.” Offering a clear-eyed explanation of the root causes of this insidious and entrenched bias and laying out its sometimes catastrophic consequences, Doing Harm is a rallying wake-up call that will change the way we look at health care for women.
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Author
Maya Dusenbery
Pages
400
Publisher
HarperCollins
Published Date
2018-03-06
ISBN
0062470809 9780062470805
Community ReviewsSee all
"This is a very well researched book full of data and real life anecdotes as illustration. While anecdotes often keep readers more engaged between the informational parts, these anecdotes are extremely repetitive and may lose some readers. However, I found the repetition really drives home the similarity of experience despite the specific issue and the importance of believing women and investing resources in understanding womens health. "
C
CaitVD
"We're told to not Google our symptoms... but what else can we do when doctors refuse to believe us when we KNOW something is wrong?<br/><br/>For hundreds of years, women's health issues were dismissed as the result of women being believed to be psychotic, anxious, stressed, pregnant, not pregnant, fat, and the list goes on and on. It only stands to reason that these deep seated beliefs and practices have trickled down into modern medicine. The amount of sexism and denial in medicine is still shockingly high. Every, and yes I mean EVERY, woman I know has a frustrating story of fighting to be believed and correctly diagnosed by doctors, including myself. Some were life threatening errors on behalf of the doctors for refusing to believe the patient. Sadly, this book just confirmed how truly frequent these incidents are.<br/><br/>Here are two of my favorite ("favorite") examples from the book. In one, a woman was LITERALLY HAVING MULTIPLE HEART ATTACKS SO DEADLY THEY ARE CALLED WIDOW MAKERS, and when she went to the ER, they told her nothing was wrong with her heart and they didn't know why her arm hurt. In another, a woman was refused medication and essentially called a drug seeker until a scan showed that her STOMACH had a hole in it and everything was leaking out into her body. She was pumped full of drugs and sent to emergency surgery.<br/><br/>The book is filled with stories like these, and it has just affirmed everything my mother told me about going to the doctor: YOU know your body, seek multiple opinions, research the drugs they try to prescribe and decide if you really need them [I've worked in a doctor's office and I've seen how relentless the pharmaceutical reps are to get doctors to prescribe more medications], research the possible conditions that align with your symptoms and ask a doctor to definitively disprove that you have those conditions, and be your own advocate. Doctors are still grossly uneducated about many women's issues, such as POTS and endometriosis. It also doesn't help that medical issues that largely affect women are not put at the forefront when it comes to medical research.<br/><br/>This book is a very validating yet disheartening look at how women are treated by doctors simply because they're women. It is essential reading, and I hope it inspires advocacy and change in the near future."
Leah Silecchia
"The medical professionals left women out of research since its inception. It's no wonder they don't know more about conditions that impact women and attribute most of our symptoms to being all in our heads. A good read for those that don't believe that BS"
Amy May