In 2016, a professor of Reproductive Health from University College London published a paper that claimed to prove that period pain can be as painful as a heart attack.
So, why isn’t period pain taken as seriously as any other medical emergency? This same paper demonstrated the lack of proper research and attention to the issue of period pain, something that is routinely written off as very common and treated usually with over-the-counter painkillers, something that masks the pain and avoids the detection of other issues, like endometriosis, the diagnosis of which is usually seven years late, making it much harder to treat.
The results of this research shouldn’t be ignored: one in every ten women in the world suffers from endometriosis, which is accompanied by heavy pain, bleeding, low blood pressure, and vomit, which usually ends up in a medical leave.
In March 2018, the Parliamentary Women’s Health Group in England conducted a sampling that showed that 40% of 2600 women with endometriosis said they had been to the doctor at least ten times before getting a precise diagnosis.
This bias goes even beyond class perceptions, as proven by journalist Joe Fassler, who wrote a chronicle for The Atlantic about the ordeal he and his wife had to go through for treating a cyst in her ovary and that grew so much that it was crushing one of her Falopian tubes.
Rachel, Fassler’s wife, had to wait for over two hours in an emergency room before she was seen by a doctor, even after she reported intense pain: 11 in a scale of one to ten.
The worst part of this case is that the average waiting time for an emergency room patient in the US at the moment was 28 minutes.
Later, he would discover that the Brooklyn hospital where they went had a waiting time of about one hour and 49 minutes. To make matters worse, the amount of time men have to wait for medical care is 49 minutes, while women have to wait an average of 65 minutes.
Nobody at the hospital thought that Rachel’s condition was a real emergency. They even put a tourniquet on her arm and treated her for renal issues two hours after she arrived at the hospital. She had to wait 14 hours to be led to a surgery room for a proper intervention, and it all was because there is generalized prejudice against taking women’s pain seriously.
170 million women around the world suffer from endometriosis, but emergency rooms are not qualified to diagnose and treat this common condition. Even in 2015, Kirstie Wilson, a 21-year-old English woman died from cervical cancer because all of her doctors told her the pain she was feeling was most probably due to ulcers.
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