We are prompted by the International Women's Day to celebrate women and womanhood. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that women, including receiving appropriate medical care, may face more than their fair share of challenges. What are some of these challenges, and why are they happening? Why are women still struggling to get the right diagnosis? Women have played a vital role in enhancing cross-clinical fields of medical care.
Figures such as Dorothea Dix, who helped change the face of mental health care, Rosalind Franklin, who helped discover the structure of human DNA, and Dr. Virginia Apgar, who put together evaluation criteria evaluating the health status of newborn infants, revolutionized medicine. Despite this, in medical settings, women and girls continue to face challenges and discrimination across the world.
For example, only last year senior Tokyo Medical School staff, as well as Juntendo and Kitasato Universities in Japan, admitted manipulating tons of entrance exams so that fewer female candidates would qualify for their courses.
These admissions have spurred endless discussions about how women who choose medical care as a profession continue to face waves of discrimination.
Nevertheless, such problems do not stop women trying to build a medical science career. In addition, women face discrimination as patients, according to some reports. Their doctors sometimes fail to diagnose conditions with which they are troubled, or offer them the wrong diagnosis and consequently the wrong kind of medical care.
In this feature of Spotlight, we will examine some of the conditions underdiagnosed by doctors in women and explore some of the possible reasons behind these medical care deficiencies.