Ever Felt Like a Doctor was Downplaying Your Pain Because You're a Woman?

You're not alone. It's a real phenomenon. Women, who are simultaneously: 1) thought to be overdramatic and not able to control their emotions (and thus exaggerate their pain); and 2) expected to endure pain through their entire lives without complaining, are often ignored in emergency departments.

Not cool. The case that I'm seeing most often is that of ovarian tortion, in which, for various reasons, a woman's ovary or ovaries become cut off from their blood supply when their falopian tubes twist aroud themselves.

In one of the cases that I saw, the woman in question had two ovarian cysts that became so heavy that they caused her fallopian tube on one side to twist around itself twice. That slowly killed one of her ovaries.

As one with a brain can imagine, having an organ slowly die inside of you is incredibly painful. Yet no one thought to give this woman an ultrasound. In another case, chronicled in the Atlantic, a female patient (the journalist's wife) had an ovarian cyst to large that it caused the ovarian torsion.

Yet she was treated at the emergency department with impatience and something resembling disdain. They dismissed her pain as kidney stones as her organ slowly died and became irritated when she could not stop writhing in pain. Yes, "Yentl Syndrome" is a thing - the phenomenon by which a woman has to first prove to medical treaters that their pain is not exaggerated, before being treated as a man would be without having to prove his pain.

Unfortunately, these cases are extremely difficult to litigate. For one, how can we prove whether the patient's ovary would have survived if an ultrasound had been done earlier? What are the damages if the woman doesn't want to have any, or more, children. Since the pain comes in waves, what if the defense claims that the highest level of pain occurred outside the hospital, so the patient should have gone in sooner?

These cases are so hard, and so injust, and injust because they are so hard. Stay tuned as this area of the law develops more.