It’s easy to forget that scientific medicine is not composed of objective facts but rather is the interpretation of things using various theories about how the world works. When that story doesn’t line up with the results, those results are dismissed. The Atlantic has an article on how researchers have handled the troublesome finding that ice cream consumption correlates with a lower risk of developing diabetes.
There are people deciding what to look for, what to measure, how to measure it, and then making sense of the findings…including which findings to share in press releases and which to think ‘hmm, that’s weird, that can’t be right’ and ignore. Which might not matter very much, since there doesn’t always seem to be much of a correlation between the findings of medical research and how medicine is actually practiced.
After I read The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks' Teeth to Frogs' Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From I was sharing fun facts from the book with everyone I encountered. It explains how medical researchers struggled to reconcile the facts of human reproduction with their understanding of the world in a way that had me alternating between gasping in horror and cackling hysterically (also in horror, where it tips over and becomes hilarious). It’s hundreds of years of men explaining that women have basically nothing to do with making babies. And you thought medical gaslighting was a problem now!
Scientific medicine is the product of a specific worldview. Sexism in scientific medicine isn’t something that we can identify and remove. Scientific medicine evolved in a sexist world and that sexism permeates it.
Aeon approaches the same topic as the book in a way that's a little less fun to read, by focusing less on absurd medical theories and more on their modern impact:
“in 1976 the US Supreme Court ruled it was not discriminatory for private medical insurance to exclude pregnancy and childbirth. Their reasoning was that these insurance policies covered everything that might happen to the ‘standard’ human body – including prostate cancer and circumcision. It was acceptable not to cover things that might happen to the non-standard body, such as pregnancy. Happily, this Supreme Court decision was overturned with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, but many examples of this subtle discrimination remain.”
Ah, yes, not covering things like pregnancy are certainly ‘subtle’ discrimination.
I’m not trying to discredit science, just to remember that science isn’t objective and unbiased, since science is the product of humans. Sometimes we see what we want to see. And sometimes folks are simply unwilling to admit that they know what’s going on.
One of the hardest things to read about is when family caregivers kill the person they're caring for. Often, the lack of respite care and support services are named as factors. When family members are obligated to provide care and the person receiving care has no option to choose how care is provided we are putting people in dangerous situations. Options aren’t nice to have, they’re essential.
NOLA is known as a city of parades because of how things worked before medical insurance was common.
Courses on care work, some of which are free, most of which are low cost.
This cartoon is way more fun than any of the articles I linked to: https://www.instagram.com/p/CrLLcULuDlu/