BOYS WILL BE... EVERYONE?

IT TOOK TWELVE YEARS for Michelle to receive a diagnosis. “I was about fourteen when I first started having symptoms,” she tells me. “I was too ashamed to go to a doctor for it.” She kept her urgent, painful, frequent, sometimes bloody bowel movements a secret for two years, until one night, it hurt too much to hide anymore. “I couldn’t move from the foetal position on my bathroom floor. I was afraid I was dying.” She was sixteen.

A 2008 analysis of a range of textbooks revealed that across 16,329 images, male bodies were used three times as often as female bodies to illustrate “neutral body parts”.

Michelle’s parents rushed her to the emergency room. A doctor there asked her (in front of her parents) if she could be pregnant. No, she couldn’t be, Michelle explained, because she hadn’t had sex, and in any case, the pain was in her intestines. She was discharged with “nothing more than some overpriced aspirin and the advice to rest for a day”.

Over the next decade Michelle sought help from two more doctors and two (male) gastroenterologists, both of whom told her that her problems were in her head and that she needed to be less anxious and stressed. At the age of twenty-six Michelle was referred to a female GP who scheduled her for a colonoscopy: it revealed that the entire left side of her colon was diseased. She was diagnosed with both irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis. “Funnily enough,” Michelle says, “my colon is not in my head.” As a result of the extended delay in receiving a diagnosis and treatment she has been left with an increased risk of colon cancer.

It’s hard to read an account like this and not feel angry with the doctors who let Michelle down so badly. But the truth is that [they] are the products of a medical system which, from root to tip, is systematically discriminating against women, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed.

It begins with how doctors are trained. Historically it’s been assumed that there wasn’t anything fundamentally different between male and female bodies other than size and reproductive function, and so for years medical education has been focused on a male ‘norm’, with everything that falls outside that designated “atypical” or even “abnormal”.