A lot of men won’t have that same experience, they’ll have the experience of waiting too long to ask for help. Which in a dark ironic manner is one way of keeping things equal, one won’t be taken seriously for 5 years, the other won’t ask for help for 5 years!
It's weird how people who complain about inequality and lack of empathy towards one group, are completely incapable or unwilling to offer any of that to other people.
Not sure why you find that weird. It's a complaint about inequality towards women, and also the inequality that men face due to misguided masculinity encouraging them not to seek medical advice (and instead rely on DIY nonsense).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9934383/ https://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/perspectives/articl... https://www.aamc.org/news/why-we-know-so-little-about-women-... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9657442/
It's a generalization that paints men in a negative light, which I took personally.
Anyhow, I don't usually pick fights online, I'm just particularly miserable today because my stupid health keeps hurting me for no reason.
To say something on topic - I've been talking to Claude about my health problems, and, while I still can't figure out what's wrong with me, I find it extremely helpful. It teaches me all sorts of things about health and medicine that no doctor would have the time or patience to explain, and helps out a lot, both with helpful information, and emotional support. I realize that it's kinda bleak to be receiving those things from an LLM instead of a person, but here we are.
I've been to dozens of doctors, spent a lot of money, they all were extremely unhelpful. Claude does offer a lot of advice and information that no doctor ever shared with me.
> It's a generalization that paints men in a negative light, which I took personally.
With compassion, I seriously suggest that you adopt a radically different perspective. OP did not come after you personally. Yet you say that you took it personally. How did you come to that reaction?
It helps to not look at all facts as binary. This leads to a brittle world view as one tries to reduce reality’s complexity into a bits. Social group membership is not like sets and propositional logic. If you’re applying that system of logic to the real world, you’ll derive false things. I look at it like the axioms are verifiably false by observation, thus poisoning the whole system.
I don’t usually wade into deep comment threads, but I want to help here. I see something you said that I used to struggle with myself. And I struggled until someone else helped me.
Good luck with your health.
Yeah, no good comes from taking things personally, or getting offended at things, or arguing about who's getting treated more unfairly. I'm just not my best self today.
No one wins here, but some suffer particularly egregious losses.
Doesn't this explain why doctors could take men complaints more "seriously"? If doctors are aware that men wait longer before asking for help, they'd know that there's a smaller window for a positive outcome in the event of a serious underlying medical condition.
I’ve concluded that most doctors are highly credentialed decision trees, they all start at the top of the tree no matter your history, and if they hit a dead end you’re going to told you are the problem, directly or indirectly.
I was talking to a doctor who specializes in a hard to diagnose condition. Somewhere close to 80% of his referrals are women. If you search online there are countless stories about how it takes longer for women to get diagnosed despite higher prevalence in women. The Facebook groups are full of complaints that women are at a disadvantage with this condition and it’s the doctor’s fault.
But when you look at research where the condition is discovered incidentally in people’s records, the gender difference disappears. When you randomly check for it, there is no gender disparity. It’s just random.
The difference, he said, is that many women are more persistent about getting diagnosed while many men avoid going to the doctor as long as possible. The fact that women are diagnosed at a higher rate and with longer time to diagnosis doesn’t, by itself, explain that a condition is more common in women or that doctors ignore them longer.
She had five knee surgeries, starting at age 20, to address instability and knee pain that were not caused by any injury (nor has she ever been overweight), just standing and walking like an average person. She has no foot arch, bruises very easily, has velvety soft skin, has an unusually high arch in the roof of her mouth, and has POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome). These are all common hallmarks of EDS, but no doctor connected the dots until the 5th surgery. BTW, none of the surgeries helped and in fact made things worse.