Our society is centered around men; that's no secret to anyone. Unless someone is really oblivious. But there are plenty of ways to prove it.
Today's story is one of them — in it, a woman who suffers from debilitating pain didn't manage to get any help because... Well, doctors simply didn't believe her. Until she found a way to make them believe, but it was rather humiliating.
More info: Reddit
Our society is centered around men — it's no secret, but that doesn't mean it makes it any easier for women
Image credits: stefamerpik / Freepik (not the actual photo)
Today's story of medical neglect just proves how hard women have it
Image credits: Freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)
In it, a woman, suffering from chronic pain for a long time, can't get help, because doctors simply don't believe her
Image credits: gpointstudio / Freepik (not the actual photo)
So, she decides to bring her husband along and suddenly doctors are all ears
Image credits: RockMoss
This infuriates the woman — why does she have to have a narrator? Why is her voice not enough?
The OP has complex regional pain syndrome or CRPS. Essentially, it’s a form of chronic pain, usually in an arm or a leg. It typically develops after some kind of injury, illness, or surgery and can grow out of proportion to the severity of the initial injury.
The post’s author started after her knee dislocation. The injury, instead of healing, turned into constant, burning nerve pain spreading through her body. She has been suffering for over a year, and most of the time, she is bedridden.
Besides physical pain, chronic pain also damages a person's mental health. It changes the levels of stress hormones and neurochemicals found in the brain and nervous system. Thus, it affects a person's mood, thinking, and behavior, and can even bring on depression and other mental illnesses.
While there’s no cure for CRPS, there are ways to relieve the debilitating pain, from physical rehabilitation to medicine. And so, the OP went to many doctors to hopefully get some of that.
She encountered a problem — none of the doctors believed her. They wrote her pain off to anxiety, depression, excessive focus, and many other things.
Doctors not taking women’s health problems seriously isn’t a one-off case — it’s a recurring problem. Just read the comments under the post — many women share how their problems were said to be their weight, mental problems, their imagination, you get the gist. Some even dub it as medical gaslighting.
Image credits: Max4e / Freepik (not the actual photo)
The problem is that it leads to women not being diagnosed with serious conditions on time, making them suffer more than needed and sometimes even losing their lives.
The OP was sick of medical professionals not hearing her out, so she came up with a plan — she started bringing her husband. And suddenly, they believe her pain when the descriptions came from his lips.
What’s most infuriating is that they not only believed him, but they started completely ignoring her. Like making him the narrator of her body. So, you get why the woman is beyond mad here — she was basically made fun of describing her pain, but when the man said the same things out loud, it became a normal description.
The silver lining here is that she might finally get some treatment for her pain. Still, the whole process seems humiliating. Maybe her body will be better off, but her emotions are hurt even more.
After the story was shared online, many other women flocked to the comments to share their experiences too
