Women: If You Want the Right Diagnosis, Take Medicine Into Your Own Hands

Contemporary feminists continue to push the myth that women are stereotyped as stupid simply because of their gender. This time the target is medical professionals who misdiagnose female patients’ pain as a mental disorder. Because these activists are stuck in Sylvia Plath’s oven, misdiagnosis is obviously the result of a patriarchal belief that all women are secretly insane.

Forget the fact that their opening citation involved a misdiagnosis by a female doctor in the UK. Their first study cited shows that women patients are prejudiced against because of their gender. Too bad that study comprised findings ranging from 1970-1995. A 2000 study on “physician and patient gender concordance” revealed that female patients often chose their doctors, often chose women doctors, and were more likely to be disappointed with their treatment than their male patient counterparts.

What the Think Progress report didn’t take into account was the amount of time doctors spend with each patient. According to a 2010 study, American doctors have an average of 32 minutes for a new-patient appointment. According to more recent reports, the average doctor visit is roughly 15 minutes, a time crunch resulting from “…Medicare’s 1992 adoption of a byzantine formula that relies on “relative value units,” or RVUs, to calculate doctors’ fees.” In Britain, the plague of socialized medicine has driven the average visit down to 11 minutes thanks to the economics of the National Health Service.

The reality is a financial, not an ideological one. Women aren’t being talked over, ignored or misdiagnosed because they’re female. They’re receiving poor treatment because the economics of an increasingly socialized system don’t permit proper attention to be given to patients, male or female alike. Medicine, like everything else in the age of Obama, is becoming self-serve. Want a proper diagnosis? Stop allowing your feminism to turn you into a paranoid wreck. Instead, use it as a driving force to take control over your own health instead of expecting the State to do it for you.