Publications
I think every woman has a story of being dismissed by doctors when they knew something was wrong or were feeling seriously unwell and in pain, writes Melanie Verwoerd.
Since Tuesday was Women's Day (I hope you all had a good one), I thought I would take the opportunity to write about something which has been occupying my mind for a while – the relationship between women and medicine.
After serious surgery last year, I came across a book called Doing Harm: The truth about how bad medicine and lazy science leave women dismissed, misdiagnosed and sick, by Maya Dusenbery. This phenomenal book reveals how the vast majority of medical research is done on male bodies and thus often inappropriate when it comes to treating women with similar conditions. Dusenbery calls the fact that medical science knows less of "every aspect of the female biology compared to male biology" the knowledge gap. However, what really interested me was what she called the trust gap.
