Are women more likely to experience medical negligence?

Are women more likely to experience medical negligence?

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In something as integral to our lives as medicine, it’s easy to think that it is free from gender bias – we are all human, after all, and if anything, men are less healthy than women. Sadly though, it’s a fact that gender bias has always had a negative effect on women over men, but does this mean that cases of medical negligence are similarly affecting women in greater numbers? In this article, we examine whether this is true.

Medical negligence, what is it?

Medical negligence occurs when a patient is harmed due to a poor standard of care. This is typically due to lapses in judgement and concentration by the healthcare workers looking after them. It’s for this reason that medical negligence can be the basis of court claims in which the patient aims to get compensation for their potentially lifechanging injuries.

Is medicine sexist?

To understand whether medical negligence is gendered, we need to look at the medical system more generally. Sadly, it has always been the case that medicine has been very focused on men. For centuries, it was, as a career, the sole preserve of men.

While women worked as nurses, men researched illnesses and approaches, and developed cures, which meant that medical thinking always tended to pay less attention to female illnesses

. They were taught within a medical education system formed through centuries – millennia – of sexist thought; the idea of men being stoic and women hysterical that still influenced medical thinking up until recently.

Even today, most clinical trial subjects are male, which is bound to have an effect on the results of said trials. As such, it is fair to say that medicine is still a sexist institution.

Is medical negligence more likely for women?

So, are women adversely affected by medical negligence? The answer is yes.

That’s because women have been systematically left out of medical thinking for so long, and their treatment is still gendered, they are unlikely to receive the same standard of care as men, increasing their likelihood of receiving negligent care.

In the 2001 book, The Girl Who Cried Pain, researchers found that women were typically given sedatives for pain instead of pain medication, in part because medical practitioners did not believe women when they reported symptoms. As you can imagine, such a situation could lead to an illness or condition being misdiagnosed or ignored, leading to much worse medical problems for the patient later down the line.

To stop this sexism, healthcare gender biases need to be looked at. Doctors need to be educated on the problem, and more research must go into understanding and recognising women’s health issues. Only then will women receive the same standard of care.

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