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Shocked, shocked I am
"Doctors provide lesser quality pain care for women despite having the same pain complaint..."
And this surprises whom, exactly? Sometimes I can't get my head around how naive people still are.
I know some people who think I shouldn't be pissed off about this. That says a lot about them, I think, and about their attitudes toward (me / women).
Well, let's see if this next link lightens my mood:
The brain tissue of those with chronic pain showed shrinkage equivalent to the amount of gray matter lost in 10 to 20 years of normal aging. Hey, maybe I can come up with some snarky replies to the next spry and healthy sixty-year-old who tells me I'm "too young to hurt this much". Sadly, in another year or two I'll be too stupid to think of them.
And this surprises whom, exactly? Sometimes I can't get my head around how naive people still are.
I know some people who think I shouldn't be pissed off about this. That says a lot about them, I think, and about their attitudes toward (me / women).
Well, let's see if this next link lightens my mood:
The brain tissue of those with chronic pain showed shrinkage equivalent to the amount of gray matter lost in 10 to 20 years of normal aging. Hey, maybe I can come up with some snarky replies to the next spry and healthy sixty-year-old who tells me I'm "too young to hurt this much". Sadly, in another year or two I'll be too stupid to think of them.
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Interesting that chronic pain doesn't just feel like it's aging you, it really is! Nasty, nasty -- but interesting!
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outraged? yup. surprised? nope.
so the next time my dad give me his obnoxious "wait til you get to be my age" bullshit, i can snap back with my usual "i'm already there" and have the study to back it up.
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(I don't believe a word of it, by the way - the men in my life have mostly complained very vocally about their pain.)
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Hugs to you. At least you started out with extra brain, so it'll be a long while before you're too stupid to by a smart aleck. ;-)
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Having said all of that, and so you don't think I am a complete jerk, my gut feeling is that many doctors probably do respond to women complaining of unexplainable pain differently. And that is a problem that we need to work on fixing. I just don't think ABC News is doing much to help. :(
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I read "despite having the same pain complaint" [emphasis mine] as meaning given two people with similar pain levels, not men who were in more dire need. The latter wouldn't be "the same".
And yeah: ABC News is unlikely to be doing much to help. Not sure how they can, except to make people less unaware that this sort of thing happens, which (I suppose, sadly) is still needed.
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Truth be told, I'm not exactly sure how they could help either. I suspect any real change will come from people choosing their own doctors and that's not an easy thing to do these days. Insurance companies give you a small enough number of doctors to work with to start with, and then switching doesn't accomplish much. In theory, I'm a big believer in changing things though personal choice and capitalism. But I think that even if I had a doctor I was extremely uncomfortable with or disappointed in, about the only thing I could think to do would be to convince enough people at my company he was unqualified (through personal experience or through mine) that I would be comfortable going to the insurance company and asking them to remove him from the list of doctors and add someone else.
And I have significant doubts that even that would work. :(
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As am I. When we have a Consumer Reports for doctors, we'll see some improvements. There's one web site (can't find it now) setting up to do something along those lines, but it doesn't have a lot of information built up yet.
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