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Comment by nonchalantsui | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to add that often times these stories of doctors not taking patients seriously (when eventually they do get diagnosed with something serious) involves women because of how vastly substandard medical testing and research is for women.

A lot of men won’t have that same experience, they’ll have the experience of waiting too long to ask for help. Which in a dark ironic manner is one way of keeping things equal, one won’t be taken seriously for 5 years, the other won’t ask for help for 5 years!

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> A lot of men won’t have that same experience

I was talking to a doctor who specializes in a hard to diagnose condition. Somewhere close to 80% of his referrals are women. If you search online there are countless stories about how it takes longer for women to get diagnosed despite higher prevalence in women. The Facebook groups are full of complaints that women are at a disadvantage with this condition and it’s the doctor’s fault.

But when you look at research where the condition is discovered incidentally in people’s records, the gender difference disappears. When you randomly check for it, there is no gender disparity. It’s just random.

The difference, he said, is that many women are more persistent about getting diagnosed while many men avoid going to the doctor as long as possible. The fact that women are diagnosed at a higher rate and with longer time to diagnosis doesn’t, by itself, explain that a condition is more common in women or that doctors ignore them longer.

As a guy struggling with a confusing health issue for close to a decade, and having the exact same experience, I'll ask you to keep your stereotypes to yourself.

It's weird how people who complain about inequality and lack of empathy towards one group, are completely incapable or unwilling to offer any of that to other people.

I apologize for offending you, but these are not stereotypes.

Not sure why you find that weird. It's a complaint about inequality towards women, and also the inequality that men face due to misguided masculinity encouraging them not to seek medical advice (and instead rely on DIY nonsense).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9934383/ https://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/perspectives/articl... https://www.aamc.org/news/why-we-know-so-little-about-women-... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9657442/

> It's a complaint about inequality towards women, and also the inequality that men face due to misguided masculinity encouraging them not to seek medical advice (and instead rely on DIY nonsense).

It's a generalization that paints men in a negative light, which I took personally.

Anyhow, I don't usually pick fights online, I'm just particularly miserable today because my stupid health keeps hurting me for no reason.

To say something on topic - I've been talking to Claude about my health problems, and, while I still can't figure out what's wrong with me, I find it extremely helpful. It teaches me all sorts of things about health and medicine that no doctor would have the time or patience to explain, and helps out a lot, both with helpful information, and emotional support. I realize that it's kinda bleak to be receiving those things from an LLM instead of a person, but here we are.

I've been to dozens of doctors, spent a lot of money, they all were extremely unhelpful. Claude does offer a lot of advice and information that no doctor ever shared with me.

First, I’m sorry about your health. That sounds like it sucks a lot. I would be angry too. I’d also be afraid and very willing to adopt anything so long as it could convince me it was even marginally helpful.

> It's a generalization that paints men in a negative light, which I took personally.

With compassion, I seriously suggest that you adopt a radically different perspective. OP did not come after you personally. Yet you say that you took it personally. How did you come to that reaction?

It helps to not look at all facts as binary. This leads to a brittle world view as one tries to reduce reality’s complexity into a bits. Social group membership is not like sets and propositional logic. If you’re applying that system of logic to the real world, you’ll derive false things. I look at it like the axioms are verifiably false by observation, thus poisoning the whole system.

I don’t usually wade into deep comment threads, but I want to help here. I see something you said that I used to struggle with myself. And I struggled until someone else helped me.

Good luck with your health.

Thanks!

Yeah, no good comes from taking things personally, or getting offended at things, or arguing about who's getting treated more unfairly. I'm just not my best self today.

Time to diagnosis for autoimmune diseases is unacceptably long, regardless of gender. That said, on average it's notably worse for women.

No one wins here, but some suffer particularly egregious losses.

It happens to everyone, but we have data showing that it happens to women more. OP is objectively correct.

These are statistically derived facts. They are a pattern. If you find an individual example that bucks the trend, that doesn’t invalidate the pattern.

> Which in a dark ironic manner is one way of keeping things equal, one won’t be taken seriously for 5 years, the other won’t ask for help for 5 years!

Doesn't this explain why doctors could take men complaints more "seriously"? If doctors are aware that men wait longer before asking for help, they'd know that there's a smaller window for a positive outcome in the event of a serious underlying medical condition.

It can play a huge role certainly. Waiting or attempting DIY solutions can often make symptoms worse, which can make diagnosing easier for the doctor, but comes with the tradeoff of potential earlier treatments.

Trust me, men can have the same experience. For whatever reason, these difficult-to-diagnose conditions affect women more, but the experience of being shunted around, given inappropriate treatment, being referred to PT as a way to get rid of the patient, it all happens to men too.

I’ve concluded that most doctors are highly credentialed decision trees, they all start at the top of the tree no matter your history, and if they hit a dead end you’re going to told you are the problem, directly or indirectly.

My own health saga taught me that there is a lot of bad medicine based on gender. A lot of doctors see something like "90% of fibromyalgia diagnosis are female" and internalize that as "men don't get fibromyalgia" even though clearly 10% of them did.

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