Medical Sexism in the Midlands

When I was serving as an elected Vice-President of the College of Health, there were three serious wrongs that I was campaigning about: the cruel uselessness of the NHS Complaints Procedures, the need for a rational approach to the treatment of pain, and the sex prejudice of doctors that led to failure to investigate and treat women's physical problems. As a result, I received post from people damaged by the system. Most of this post was about the great suffering caused to women by the sex prejudice of doctors.

This is the letter I received from a woman in the Midlands:

Dear Margaret Wilde

Following the item by Peter Pallot in the Daily Telegraph I write to support your view that women, in particular, are too often dismissed as neurotic by their doctors, and no real attempt is made to find the real nature of their illness.

As a member of the Endometriosis Society - recently appointed a National Trustee - I know of many sufferers, including myself, who have for years been treated as neurotic before emergency admission to hospital has revealed the real cause of the symptoms.

Endometriosis is a very debilitating disease and the symptoms can be very vague. Many sufferers say that only when they pluck up the courage to say that intercourse is very painful that doctors do something about their problems. It is felt that when a man's pleasure is affected 'that can't be allowed!'

My own case with Endometriosis began with painful periods at the age of fifteen. I was treated with tranquillisers, over a number of years. I was told 'to pull myself together', by all the doctors in my practice. I did to some extent accept that what they said about me must be correct. (Now this makes me angry to think about it.) Just three weeks before emergency surgery in July 1971 - age 27 years - I was threatened with admission to Psychiatric Hospital if 'I didn't pull myself together'. On the day of my admission to hospital my GP said I had a pulled stomach muscle! Later that night my left ovary was removed in 'a near gangrenous state' and half of my right ovary. The surgeon, a lady, was very angry about my treatment, as I had the most advanced case of endometriosis she had ever seen.

In 1978 I began suffering again and had the galling experience of repeated visits to the doctors who still treated me as neurotic. In the spring of '79, almost 12 months later, a laparoscopy was done (to shut me up) and I was found to have Chronic Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, Multiple Adhesions and Chronic Infection. No wonder I had felt so ill!

Almost 5 years ago I began an association with the Endometriosis Society which is a self help support group. My aims were to try and do something to prevent other women going through my horrendous experiences. The most recent effort with this aim in mind has been the production of the booklet 'Endometriosis' for General Practitioners. At the moment its distribution has been limited to Coventry, Warwickshire, two London boroughs, Lincoln and Humberside, although when local groups raise the funds all General Practitioners throughout the country will receive one. Unfortunately Coventry and Warwickshire doctors have not returned the feedback sheets (only 2 out of 600) - but in the other areas the reception has been marvellous.

Thank you for doing this work on behalf of women.

Any further help you require, please contact me.

I have enclosed a copy of the booklet for you.

Kind Regards

Kay Adcocks
(Kay gave her permission for her name to be included here.)
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You can read HERE about some of my own experience of terrible suffering and permanent harm done by the sex prejudice of health professionals.

Medical Sexism in the South West

When I was serving as an elected Vice-President of the College of Health, there were three serious wrongs that I was campaigning about: the cruel uselessness of the NHS Complaints Procedures, the need for a rational approach to the treatment of pain, and the sex prejudice of doctors that led to failure to investigate and treat women's physical problems. As a result, I received post from people damaged by the system. Most of this post was about the great suffering caused to women by the sex prejudice of doctors.

This is the letter I received from a suffering woman in the South West:

Dear Margaret Wilde

An article in the Daily Telegraph alerted me to your work concerning the treatment sick women receive at the doctor's surgery. I hope my story will interest you and add grist to your mill. At least that way something positive will have been salvaged from an otherwise horribly negative experience.

In short, I can vouch that sick women truly do get treated as neurotics when they actually have some real and serious condition. The doctor's surgery is a place where women can meet indifference, complacency, and downright negligence all cowering under the prejudice that the greater part of a woman's problems is simply that she is a woman and therefore must be neurotic and nowhere near as ill as she claims to be. I am allowed to use as strong words as I please because I have nearly died not once but twice and am still ill and am still battling against the old black magic called the NHS.

My story is long and complicated so I shall try to be as concise as possible. The original problem that I suffered from was not complicated at all. At 22 years old with a small baby I was suddenly overtaken with terrific pain in my back. The attack lasted for a few hours. I was alone, no telephone, no neighbours, and had to wait till my husband returned before I could see the doctor. With very little ado he diagnosed that I had an infection in my water that travelled to my kidneys, and prescribed antibiotics. Over the next six years and through repeated attacks of terrible pain he stuck to that diagnosis and kept writing out the prescriptions for antibiotics, never once bothering to confirm or deny his critical diagnosis by any test or examination or referral to another doctor. My condition of course grew worse but that didn't seem to bother him. Time and time again I was offered Septrim and Flagyl for my 'infection' and nothing else. Even at the point when I lay dying in my bed for five days with pain so bad that one doctor administered shots of morphine to me, when he, my doctor, managed to visit me, all he offered was a cheery smile and a prescription for Septrim and Flagyl and hurriedly left. The next day, though called out first thing in the morning, he breezed in at four in the afternoon. Five days I lay prostrate in my bed, the culmination of a long period of illness, and he did not consider me to be seriously ill. Perhaps he thought that young women took to their beds as a matter of course.

I was finally admitted to hospital where it was discovered that I had an Ovarian cyst that had strangulated my ovary rendering it gangrenous and causing peritonitis. The explanation for his tardy treatment was really quiite simple. He thought I was neurotic; he made me feel I was neurotic. At one stage he implied that I was wasting his time by continually visiting his surgery. He had many patients to look after and most of them were far sicker than U was. Those were his words. When my husband saw him about a sore throat he said, "It's amazing how someone like you never comes to see me unless they are really bad, when other people are here all the time over every little thing." My husband took his inference that the other people referred to meant me. A man with a sore throat is automatically assumed to be truly suffering while a woman with a persistent pain is a persistent nuisance. That he never took my suffering seriously is confirmed by the fact that he never bothered to investigate the series of infections that I was supposed to be suffering from.

The operation to remove my ovary saved my life. But it left me with a shattered digestion and a series of terrifying abdominal spasms. Down to my new doctor's again. That went on for another four years. Was it taken seriously? Was it heck. Though I repeatedly maintained that it was caused by the operation, I was told that it was my gall bladder, that I was allergic to wheat, that it was simply bellyache caused by adhesions and it was not at all serious. Why was my suffering never taken seriously? Why? Why? Why? In August last year I suffered a spasm to end all spasms. My bowel was dangerously involved with an adhesion and finally won by twisting itself around the adhesion and strangulating itself. There is no way to describe the pain of that.

Another emergency operation. Gangrene again. Lost six inches of bowel. Recovery from that operation was marred by abscesses. When they eventually disappeared I realised that I was not going to recover normally. I am in pain all the time. But what has enraged me beyond words is that I still meet with the same old cavalier attitude from doctors. My God, what does a woman have to suffer from before she is treated with the same respect as a man? If I suffered from a heart complaint I'm sure I would be taken seriously. After all it kills men. But death by adhesions though agonising is a lesser form of death. After a lot of pushing I'm finally going for a barium meal X-ray. But how I have had to push for that! I find writing this letter hard as I am still very weak and distressed. I have had two serious conditions that have been ignored by doctors till they nearly killed me. I am left to pick up the pieces of my shattered life in pain and virtually told that there's not much can be done for me. I could not have received worse treatment if I tried. A witch doctor in Africa would at least have cared for my spirit, and a money-grabbing doctor in America may not have respected my sex but he would have respected my money. I would rather be faced with the prospect of a large bill than a life of pain. But the NHS cares for neither God nor Mammon, so the likes of me get lost along the way. I am suing everybody that I can but that is no consolation either for my pain or the lost years. Most of all I wanted the world to know what can happen to a young woman who develops a simple complaint like an ovarian cyst and what the system can do to her.

Then I came across your article in the paper and suddenly felt that I was not alone. On behalf of women like me I want you to scream from the rooftops that lives are being shattered by this prejudice. My list of complaints against the NHS is endless. But the prevailing factor has been that of prejudice, the old prejudice that most of my trouble lies in the fact that i cannot cope either with my pain or my life. The fact that my distress may be genuine is the last one to be considered.

I hope you find my story appalling. I hope it will help you in some way. Here in Cornwall I shall try to do all I can to expose the complacent attitude towards women. Please write to me if I can be of further help to you. You have my best wishes.

Yours
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You can read HERE about some of my own experience of terrible suffering and permanent harm done by the sex prejudice of health professionals.

NHS GPs are reporting very few of the many thousands of errors they make in treating and diagnosing patients.

GPs are reporting very few of the many thousands of errors they make in treating and diagnosing patients. See Telegraph article. To be honest, I'm very surprised to read that they report any. The GPs who have so badly harmed me have certainly never reported those mistakes. Nor has any other health professional who has harmed me. And I've never personally heard of any healthcare worker reporting their mistakes to anyone. That's one of the reasons they never learn from their mistakes of course.

40,000 die every year after hospital blunders, MPs are told. - I doubt they'll do anything at all effective about it.

40,000 die every year after hospital blunders, MPs are told
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"One in 10 people admitted to hospital suffers some kind of "harm" because of the treatment they receive, members of the House of Commons Health Committee heard.

The figures were given to members of the House of Commons Health Committee as part of its inquiry into the safety of patients.

NHS managers have already drawn up a list of serious mistakes which doctors and nurses are required to report in order to build a more accurate picture of the numbers who die as a result of mistakes by hospitals.

The blunders include carrying out the wrong operation on patients, administering the wrong drugs, leaving instruments inside patients after operations and failing to put up bars to stop patients falling out of bed.

Professor Richard Thomson, from Newcastle University's institute of health and society, said the most reliable evidence showed around 10 per cent of patients admitted to hospital suffered "harm" because of treatment.

He told the committee that the number of overall deaths caused by medical care going wrong was far from clear but that some estimates put it at up to 40,000 a year."

I am confident that very great and completely avoidable, permanent and agonising harm that was done to me as an inpatient last year, following a very complicated fracture, will not have been reported. The NHS is a national scandal - expensive, uncaring and incompetent, in my informed opinion. It should be scrapped.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Children and Obesity

See Sodium in foods

vulnerable groups

See amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

The National Patient Safety Agency reports that many hospital fatalities are avoidable.

Hundreds of hospital fatalities 'avoidable' - Telegraph

Extract:

"One third of deaths in hospital investigated by a patient safety watchdog could have been avoided, claims a report released today.

The National Patient Safety Agency looked into 1,804 fatal hospital incidents reported to it in 2005. It found that 576 were "potentially avoidable" if there had been better communication between staff, faster recognition of the patient's deteriorating state, improved training and more accurate interpretation of test results.

Some 425 of the deaths investigated by the NPSA in 2005 were in acute or general hospitals. Of these, 71 were reported to be related to diagnostic errors, in 64 cases the patient's deteriorating condition was not recognised or not acted upon, and 43 involved a problem with resuscitation after cardiac arrest.

The remainder were connected to medication errors, suicide or still-birth."

Many thousands of deaths both in and out of hospital are avoidable - and the suffering that precedes them. - If only the public were to be told the truth about obesity and if only the medical profession would stop giving the dangerous, futile, counterproductive advice that to lose excess weight it is necessary to eat less/to eat fewer calories/to cut down on fat/carbohydrates, etc! - Obesity is caused by fluid retention, not by overeating.

Obesity is not caused by overeating. It is caused by the conjunction of salt sensitivity and sodium intake, which leads to fluid retention.

It is over 50 years since steroids were first prescribed and it is beyond belief that most doctors are still unaware in practice of their potential for causing sodium and water retention and morbid obesity and the many other serious health problems attendant on these...

Calorie counting and advice about increasing exercise and reducing fat and carbohydrate intake to reduce obesity are ineffective, counter-productive and often damaging. - See the article in the British Medical Journal of November 2003 BMJ article for actual research on what happens when this advice is followed! - Over 800 obese adults were put on energy deficit diets, given diet sheets and plenty of instruction and help from trained staff, and apparently, visited fortnightly for a year, at the end of which they had GAINED weight! This mirrors the real experience of obese people, viz. - dieting makes you fat.

It is commonly accepted now, except by the 'experts', that less than 5% of dieters actually lose weight, and most gain weight as a result of dieting. - Even the ones who manage to lose weight do not usually improve their health. - See Overweight who diet risk dying earlier, says study for a report in The Guardian of Monday, June 27th 2005. It is about a huge research study of nearly 3000 people over a period of 18 years. The study found that overweight people who diet to reach a healthier weight are more likely to die young than those who remain fat. It also found that dieting causes physiological damage that in the long term can outweigh the benefits of the weight loss.

Contributing to the increase in obesity we have the widespread prescribing of steroids and HRT and other drugs which cause weight gain, and the failure of doctors to adhere to the protocols connected with the prescribing and monitoring of steroids. But pre-eminent, in my opinion, is the catastrophically damaging calorie-reduction advice that continues to be given despite such a wealth of evidence that it is bad advice.

Another possible factor is the increase in the amount of oestrogen in the water table.

Salt produces weight gain only in vulnerable people, i.e.

1. People whose veins are weak because of immaturity (babies, children),

2. People whose veins are relaxed or weak because of steroids, HRT, amitriptyline or certain other prescribed drugs, too readily prescribed, often in very high dose.

3. People whose natural hormone levels are altered (e.g. pregnant women).

4. 'Slimmers' - People whose blood vessel walls have been weakened by 'slimming' - i.e. eating insufficient food.


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and Associated health conditions

advice for pregnant mothers

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free...

NHS blunders kill 200 a year - that they admit to...)o:

NHS blunders kill 200 a year

Extract

"More than 200 patients died last year as a result of mistakes made by hospital staff while another 1,800 were made worse during treatment, it has been revealed.

Some patients were given overdoses of radiation or had healthy organs removed in operations, while others died after being wrongly attached to medical equipment.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that 2,109 events which could injure patients, staff or public - known as serious untoward incidents - were reported to health authorities in 2006.

At least 221 resulted in avoidable deaths, including a 76-year-old man who had a feeding tube inserted into his lungs instead of his stomach and a pensioner who was given air instead of pure oxygen.

Hundreds more patients were made worse while in hospital because of wrong diagnoses or mistakes in treatment, such as a woman who had chemotherapy and surgery for ovarian cancer when she never had the disease."

There is absolutely no doubt that the real numbers of people who lost their health, or even their lives, will be far, far, far higher than given in this report.

And what about the thousands of patients who lose their lives because hospital staff don't wash their hands between dealing with patients, thus spreading MRSA, with its devastating consequences? See thousands of hospital staff fail to

I have written many times (see other entries in this blog and see also my website) of the many thousands of patients greatly harmed and suffering early death because of cavalier prescribing of drugs that cause sodium and water retention and poor or non-existent monitoring of patients on these drugs, and because of the counter-productive, incorrect and harmful advice to lose weight by eating fewer calories. instead of recognising that obesity is caused by fluid retention, which can usually be considerably reduced by reducing salt/sodium intake and eating plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.

No record at all is kept of the numbers of steroid victims and other victims of this negligent prescribing which results in morbid obesity - unless the warning about sodium retention is given!

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)