misdiagnoses in women, care oriented towards men

• Carmen Dorlo

  online editor

Chest pain? Panic. Migraine? fatigue. Extreme Abdominal Pain? He definitely walks away.

For decades, women have been misdiagnosed or undiagnosed with a disease because the male body is often the norm in research and practice. Today, the Voices For Women foundation delivers a petition with more than 53,000 signatures to the House of Representatives calling attention to gender-specific assistance.

At the moment there are no structural funds to solve this problem. The Ministry of Health is now using €3 million to reduce the knowledge gap on sex and gender differences. This is a fraction of the money that is available for medical visits in total (326.2 million euros).

“Medicine was developed extensively in the 1950s and 1960s, for and by men,” explains Professor Bart Fauser. As co-founder of Alliantie Gender and Health, he is committed to raising awareness of gender differences in health care.

“At that time, it was deliberately decided to conduct studies mainly in men. Especially since serious complications could arise in women due to unexpected or unwanted pregnancies.” The assumption was that the study results for men were the same as for women. “That’s not fair. Almost everything in the body is different for men and women.”

Recently, women have become more prominent as researchers and doctors. But above all abroad, greater attention has been paid to this issue. “More knowledge is gradually becoming available, but it has hardly affected healthcare in the Netherlands. Even in 2022, women are worse off than men in healthcare,” says Fauser.

Journalist and former nurse Mirjam Kaijer is an expert by experience. Only ten years later she was diagnosed with a benign tumor of the parathyroid gland. She has done research and found that 80% of patients with unexplained health problems are women.

Kaijer wrote the book about his experiences I’m not a man. “There were so many reactions that I started a petition, a hotline and finally the Voices for Women foundation. I ran into a cesspool. There is so much suffering. These women all want to be treated seriously and fairly.”

According to Fauser, it’s a twofold problem. Not only is there little attention paid to male/female differences in general diseases, there is also little attention given to women-specific diseases, such as endometriosis, fibroids in PCOS.

Kaijer also sees a large group of women with unexplained complaints on her hotline who are too quickly labeled as psychological disorders, not ruling out physical causes.

Former Israeli professor Marek G Readerman had previously conducted research on the matter. He found that doctors are more likely to see symptoms in women as due to psychosocial issues, while in men, symptoms are more likely to be seen as physical.

A similar picture emerges from another ongoing UMCG study. This shows that women often have more serious and long-lasting physical ailments. Yet women are diagnosed 6% less frequently. “They also get a referral to a specialist or a physical exam less often,” says researcher Aranka Ballering.

Antoinetta Schutrups lived it. She remembers a moment in the doctor’s office. “My husband talked about his tiredness. The general practitioner immediately suggested an examination, while my husband said it could also be stress. However, the general practitioner insisted on scheduling a follow-up examination. I was shocked by this , because shortly before my similar complaints they were labeled ‘psychologically’. It was a completely different conversation”.

It was years ago. After twenty years of searching, Schutrups now has a diagnosis: a benign tumor on his pituitary gland, a gland in the lower part of the brain. Schutrups had, among other things, pain in his legs, tiredness and sadness. However, she was diagnosed with depression and referred for mental health care. “I knew I wasn’t depressed. I had so much pain in my body, but I still wanted to do a lot of things.”

In this video she tells how she finally managed to get the diagnosis right:

Schutrups’ life changed dramatically due to the drugs. All complaints disappeared. “I have always assumed that medical science has all the knowledge to make the right judgment about my health, but I realize more and more that this is not the case. It doesn’t happen on purpose, but due to the lack of knowledge of the female body it is only a huge blind spot”.