I know your intention was simply to raise the issue of gender biases in medical research resource allocation, but it set off a gender flamewar, and that's just the kind of thing we're trying to avoid on HN. It's important to think about the consequences of the comments we post, and it was predictable that this kind of thing would happen.

For what it's worth, I saw the comment earlier and thought "not great but don't want to silence a valid point about gender biases in something as important as medical research", but looking now at the flamewar that's resulted, I'm afraid we just have to uphold the guidelines.

Another thought that came to mind when I saw your comment:

Over the years I've had my own experiences with illnesses that cause great pain, distress and limitations on life options, and during those times I often had thoughts along the lines of "people in my category with illnesses like this just aren't considered important enough to attract research funding and care for our plight".

Having continued to look into the topic very deeply, another explanation arises: conditions like this (complex disorders involving autoimmunity – even of the relatively mild kind that I had) are just very difficult to research, because as soon as you start studying a cohort of patients, it turns out to be very difficult to find consistent factors that explain the condition.

My understanding is that endometriosis (and I have learned a little about it from seeing loved ones being diagnosed with it or evaluated for it) is that it's of the same kind; it seems to be at least partially an autoimmune disease (or frequently co-morbid with autoimmune diseases) and, as the article states, it has been found to be extremely difficult to explain, let alone treat. We see similar obstacles with other autoimmune illness like ALS and MS, both of which have had huge amounts of funding over the years but still elude researchers' attempts to even explain them, let alone cure them.

It just seems that some illnesses are extremely hard to explain and cure, even with vast amounts of money invested in them, and that's particularly the case with anything involving autoimmunity.

>> My Wife has often said, "If Men were susceptible to a similar, or the same disease, it would see far more research and or funding.

I wish we would stop turning everything into a competition. As a man with a similar 'tricky' condition I can confirm the medical profession is generally shit with anything tricky regardless of your sex. I have experienced the exact same fight for treatment and investigation that I often read of women experiencing.

Like we put money in fixing homelessness, which affects mostly men right? Like we put money in suicide prevention which affects mostly men in every single country in the world? Feminism portrays a heavily distorted view of the world, such movement helped fix fundamental problems like women's voting rights, but it has a tendency for overcorrection and overestimating the number of problems caused by "the patriarchy" that are actually caused by "humans are shitty sometimes about some major issues"

Don't worry, we are susceptible to many pain conditions. Some of which are worse, and some of which women can get, too.

And of these more painful conditions the research is... Just as lacking. I do get the desperation for... Something. Anything.

Actually Covid saw the biggest research boost - my own is seen as a good control for long covid. A number of autoimmune conditions got similar increased interest. Right up until a political group decided covid research was a nice target.

(I've been in pain for 2/3rds of my life. Pain generally described as exceeding childbirth. There is never a lull. There is no treatment that works.)

On other areas it's the other way around, breast cancer gets a lot of attention while prostate cancer gets less.

Honestly it's probably just because the condition responds well to hormonal therapy. If you've got a cheap and effective treatment available for a condition it's hard to justify spending research dollars on digging deeper into it (particularly something as strange as Endometriosis, eg. where do you even start looking).

The strong genetic component also makes it somewhat unlikely that it's something we'll be able to ever eliminate completely but perhaps there will one day be targeted drugs that can stop disease progression. It's good to see more research dollars being made available in recent years.

There's a lot of other conditions that receive a similar lack of attention, for a common male analogue "chronic pelvic pain syndrome".