Can we talk about the sexism in medicine??

There was this woman in my complex who was in her 40's and passed away from stage 4 colorectal cancer. It took about ten years for her abdominal pain to be taken seriously. She was called a med seeker, hypochondriac, attention seeker, told to lose weight when the mass was growing and suggested she was pregnant. After a negative pregnancy test she was admitted for an abdominal scan. The mass was huge. She was at stage 4, given 6 months to live. She passed away last year.

I have a mole on my back that kept growing over the years. Doctors still tell me it's benign and it's only "cosmetic" despite the change in size and color. I'm trying to see a dermatologist at a huge expense to get an expert's opinion. Derms are expensive in my area, I've almost got enough saved that I can go in at the end of January.

Women can literally go into a doctor for anything and the answer they usually give; "have you tried losing weight?" 🤡 and it doesn't matter if you're in the mid range of "healthy", if you don't look like a starved runway model you're "overweight" to them. I fall into the higher mid range of "healthy", slim but lots of muscle from resistance training. Muscle adds weight, but bmi doesn't factor muscle or your skeletal frame. I had one tell me that the "healthy range is just a suggestion, but women should "really aim for the 18.5 to 19.0 range" which is the cusp of underweight.

Female doctors aren't immune to misogyny, either. Medicine was made for men. They don't even use female mice for general trials due to HoRmOnE vArIaNtS. They should be studying to be inclusive of everyone, not just focus on treating men. It's lazy. The only time female mice are used are in weight loss trials and studies.

Only 1/3 of Canadian hospitals have maternity wards. Most don't have specialized gynecological emergency exam rooms. It's sad when I see Shoppers drug mart (big time store in Canada) doing fundraisers for maternity wards, women's mental health, gynecological exam rooms in hospitals, BC women's hospital, etc because it highlights just how under/unfunded women's health is here, even in Canada where gender equality is touted and bragged about.

My friend was traveling to Alberta by car back in 2012. She made it as far as the BC interior when she started to have a second trimester miscarriage. She had to drive all the way back to the lower mainland to find a hospital equipped to handle it. She went from hospital to hospital, bleeding out along the way, until she got to the Royal Columbian in the Greater Vancouver area. She almost died from blood loss. Women literally die from subpar or lack of medical care in this country. I can't even imagine waht the numbers must be in the states.