Women’s health research is gaining attention, but progress means little if patients still cannot get their pain taken seriously. As a gynecologist specializing in complex pelvic pain, I have seen how deeply medicine fails women when it treats suffering as normal. We must stop encouraging women to endure pain, demand better research and training, and hold healthcare systems accountable for delivering answers.
Otherwise, preventable suffering will continue to damage lives, families, and public health. Women make up nearly 50 percent of the global population, yet generations have learned to minimize their symptoms, push through exhaustion, and accept painful periods, painful sex, and debilitating menopause symptoms as inevitable. That conditioning does not stay inside the home.
It shapes what patients report, what doctors investigate, and which health problems receive research funding. I see the consequences in pelvic pain care. A teenager suffering from severe endometriosis once came to me with her mother, who revealed that she had passed out from heavy periods as a young woman.
She never sought help because she believed the suffering was normal. Only when her daughter experienced similarly severe symptoms did she recognize that neither should have had to endure them. This is how silence becomes hereditary.
Women teach their daughters to tolerate what they themselves were taught to tolerate. Meanwhile, clinicians may mistake a patient’s ability to function through pain for evidence that the problem is manageable. The problem is not always a lack of compassion from individual clinicians.
Medicine itself has significant gaps. Complex conditions affecting women have historically received less attention, less training, and less investment than many conditions affecting men. When providers are not equipped with the right tools, they may unintentionally dismiss patients or focus only on the most familiar solutions.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
