“In her 23 years practicing medicine, Sherif has received a lot of thank-you notes from women she’s treated—and “they don’t say ‘Thank you for saving my life’ or ‘Thank you for that great diagnosis,’” she says. “They say, ‘Thank you for listening to me.’ Or ‘I know we couldn’t get to the bottom of it, but thank you for being there.’”
Fetters, Ashley, The Atlantic, "The Doctor Doesn’t Listen to Her. But the Media Is Starting To."
What Hasn't Changed?
All of these women mentioned have drastically changed the field of medicine not only for their countries but for other countries surrounding it. Many of them paved a path for other women to study medicine, while a lot has change since then, it cannot be said that its infallible there is still much to be done about the current medical system.
Young, Kate, The Guardian, "The female problem: how male bias in medical trials ruined women's health"
““For much of documented history, women have been excluded from medical and science knowledge production, so essentially we’ve ended up with a healthcare system, among other things in society, that has been made by men for men,””
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Dr. Kate Young from Monash University says that historically, medical science about women has been “constructed to reinforce the hysteria discourse and women as reproductive bodies discourse,” (Young, Kate). She cites the caricatures of skeletons, where the female body is intentionally drawn to have wider hips and smaller skulls to enforce a portrayal that women had bodies too frail and brains too small to do anything other than have children. Young has found that not only have medical practitioners and scientists been men, but almost all cells, animals and humans studied in medical science were male. It is
important to note that since medicine sees women as reproductive bodies first and the main difference between the two genders, researchers have gotten away with purposely not studying women.
The application of medicine for women still leaves much to be desired. For women, a visit to the doctor follows a three-act-structure, where they inform the doctor of an issue; the doctor denies it; then through a series of tests, a physician acknowledges the actuality of her pain. This phenomenon has happened so often there is a term for it: Health-care gaslighting. A research by the University of Maryland titled “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” in 2001 found that women get prescribed less pain medication than men after the same procedures, less likely to be admitted to hospitals or receive tests for pain. The practice of the disregard of women’s health issues in favor of an issue of the mind has been embraced even to this day.
Fact of the matter is, this situation has escalated to a point where women have started opening women-only health-care facilities to rebuke these practices. Women’s health centers are a series of complex integrated clinics specifically catered to the needs of women. For many, the concept of a women’s health center is synonymous with gynecologic care, however that could not be further from the truth. These health centers are a “one-stop shop for healthcare,” (Cancerconnect). The benefits of having a women’s health-center is the ability to receive care they would never find in a regular doctor's office, allow doctors to communicate and do examinations in real-time and provide a safe space for women.