6 Absurd Ways Modern Medicine Fails Because Of Sexism

6 Male Depression Isn't Taken Seriously, And Female Depression Is Overmedicated

There are actually two separate medical classifications for "male" and "female" depression because of how different they are. Some might even argue that the "male" variant isn't really depression at all, as it's less prevalent than the "female" version and its symptoms include things like working late, feeling enraged, and engaging in physical activity or reckless behavior. We don't regard those things as symptoms of a mental health issue; those are symptoms of being Batman.

And that's the problem. Despite male depression being less common and having a list of symptoms that aren't considered serious by the average person, rates of male suicide are four times higher than female suicide. We simply don't allow for men to be depressed, unless they follow up their diagnoses by immediately painting a skull on their chests and murdering half of the criminal underworld.

In a University of Westminster study, 1,200 participants read identical short stories about a person called either Kate or Jack. When they were asked if that person was depressed, the Jack group was far more likely to answer "no" than the Kate group, all because the person in question was a guy, and apparently guys don't get depressed. Or if they do, they do it in cool and badass ways that get them their own HBO series.

But it's not like women have it any better. It's true that women are much more likely to be diagnosed with depression, but once they are, they are also more likely to be stuffed with more drugs than a pinata at Walter White Jr.'s birthday party. Today's doctors gallantly sling prescriptions for abusable narcotics and anti-anxiety drugs to depressed women, which is arguably at least one reason female death from prescription overdose has gone up 400 percent since 1999.

Part of the problem is that it can be difficult to know how certain medication is going to affect women. That's because ...

5 Medical Studies Focus Almost Exclusively On Male Test Subjects

Men and women have different reactions to prescription drugs, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone who grew up with that one uncle who liked to mix his vodka with more painkillers than your mom needed for the entirety of her recovery from shoulder surgery. Women tend to have a stronger response to painkillers than men, due to the fluctuating levels of estrogen in their system. However, they are also more likely to get addicted to the meds, and might need more time to flush them and other drugs, like sleeping pills, out of their systems.

That is all vital information which we are lucky to have, considering that the majority of medical/pharmaceutical research is being done on male bodies. When researchers from Northwestern University checked out 2,300 published medical studies, they found that 80 percent of them were performed on male test subjects, with zero attempts made to try and figure out how their results might change when applied to women. Until the 1990s, women were banned from clinical trials altogether, because it took decades of modern medicine for medical researchers to finally realize that there are some physiological differences between men and women that should probably be accounted for.

But how different can the male and female body be? We're all humans, right? Any differences should be relatively minor, but all the big, important stuff should be the same. For instance, heart attacks probably look pretty similar across the board, right? (With the possible exception that the female heart shows up in x-rays wearing a tiny bow, so you can tell it's a lady's.)

Well, the thing is that men and women have spectacularly different heart attacks, specifically because the physiological differences between the genders are so extreme. Men usually experience a sudden, crushing pain in their chests, while a female heart attack is slower, more subtle, and often accompanied by fatigue and nausea. Unfortunately, the male symptoms of a heart attack have been considered the baseline for so long that heart attacks are tough to spot in women, because their symptoms are considered "atypical" (a term here meaning "different from men's"). In fact, this is the case with many major afflictions. Which unfortunately means that ...

4 Women Are More Likely To Be Told That Their Pain Is All In Their Heads

For 4,000 years, diagnosing women was the easiest job in the world. No matter what was wrong them -- be it depression, seizures, or gunshot wounds -- it was all chalked up to "hysteria." It was a catch-all mental disorder that basically meant that all of a woman's health issues were a product of her own daffy imagination.

Of course, the medical world has changed drastically since then. Modern doctors use hysteria to explain way more female ailments that their old-timey counterparts could've ever even dreamed of. The only difference is that modern doctors have retired the word "hysteria" in favor of new phrases like "stress" or "psychosomatic symptoms," which have a vastly different number of syllables, but serve the same purpose of dismissing patients with legitimate health problems. These include but not limited to: Polycystic ovary syndrome (a serious hormonal disorder), Lupus (an autoimmune disease), and Fibromyalgia (a rheumatic condition that almost exclusively affects women who tend to be told that their chronic pain is all in their heads).

It's estimated that tens of millions of women in the U.S. are dealing with unnecessary pain because doctors assume that, even if there is something wrong with them, they're probably exaggerating their symptoms. Simply put, medicine doesn't trust women to be familiar with their own bodies.

As a result, legitimately sick people often tend to hide their health problems from their doctors out of fear of being accused of making shit up, even when they might be having a heart attack. Not that telling the doctor would have made a difference -- research found that 75 percent of doctors fail to properly diagnose female patients with cardiovascular diseases if they are also suffering from stress, because the stress gets blamed for all of their symptoms. It's not like a woman could be suffering from both stress and cardiovascular problems. The strain would crush them before they even made it out to the doctor's office.

Meanwhile, on the "males get screwed too" side of the equation ...

3 Men Are Also Affected By HPV, But Don't Have The Same Access To Vaccination

The human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common female STDs in the U.S., with millions of people getting infected with it every year. It's so prevalent that many women simply consider it an everyday "part of lady life," alongside the menstrual cycle and having to pretend to be on the phone while riding public transportation so that random strangers won't ask for their hand in marriage. The good news is that only some strains of the virus are dangerous. The bad news is that the dangerous strains can lead to all sorts of cancers: cervical, vulvar, vaginal, penile ... Wait, penile? The most common female STD causes dick cancer?

See, the thing you almost never hear about HPV is that it affects men as often as women, which is why almost 10,000 guys come down with HPV-related cancer of the dick, anus, or throat in any given year. Despite that figure, the CDC reports that men are still way behind on their HPV vaccinations, possibly because nobody bothers to tell them that they even need it in the first place.

Currently, only four in 10 boys have been immunized against HPV, despite the immunization shot being publicly funded for all sexes. That's just in the U.S., though. Many countries refuse to fund the cost of HPV vaccines for men using public money, even if it would save them millions by preventing an ass-load of throat cancer cases. Researchers have predicted that HPV-related throat cancer will surpass cervical cancer as the most common form of HPV-triggered cancer by the year 2020, which is insane when you consider the only reason this is happening is because we're only immunizing less than half of all males against the virus.

2 Women Get Screwed Over When It Comes To Organ Transplants

For the last few years, researchers have been noticing that women are more likely to become living organ donors than men. Which is great, right? We always need organ donors, and women must be more selfless and noble than their male counterparts. Unfortunately, upon closer examination, the researchers discovered that women's predilection to volunteer their organs is less a case of caregiving nobility and more because we as a society kind of pressure them to generously share their vital chunks of people meat with the rest of us.

Families tend to strongly encourage women to donate their organs. However, men in the same age group are much less likely to even have a conversation about donation with their families, much less volunteer their organs for harvesting. Furthermore, according to research by a Canadian organ transplant organization, 36 percent of wives who were eligible to donate organs to their husbands went ahead with the operation, whereas only 6.5 percent of eligible husbands were willing to give their wives one of their precious organs. After all, women are property, and you wouldn't donate a kidney to your Honda.

Not only does it make almost no difference if a woman has an eligible husband for a donor or not, but as female patients get older, they are only half as likely to be put on the list for a life-saving transplant as a man the same age. Because why waste a perfectly good organ on a frail old woman if she's going to die soon? However, if she wants to donate an organ, the medical community will be more than happy to accommodate her.

1 We Suck At Diagnosing Autism In Girls

In the simplest terms possible, autism is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders that often include social awkwardness, problems with communicating thoughts and feelings, and repetitive behavior ... in boys. But if you ask a scientist about female autism, chances are you're going to get the medical equivalent of an elementary school student struggling to explain what happened to their homework.

For the longest time, we thought that autistic girls might be less intelligent and have more severe syndromes than boys. But in recent years, we discovered that male and female autism affects the brain in different ways. That turned out to be a huge problem, because all current diagnostic tools for detecting autism were developed by observing how boys behave (a familiar problem in the medical field, as we mentioned). This is why so many autistic girls have gone undiagnosed for years.

However, by comparing girls with autism to those without it -- an extremely basic form of observation that it took researchers entirely too long to figure out -- we recently started to better understand the female version of the disorder. For example, an autistic girl with high intelligence (the exact type of patient most likely to have eluded past diagnoses) might be quite good at social interactions simply because she has memorized the right things to say in the right situations. Consequently, she might become skilled at masking her disorder, which is something that doesn't occur to most boys with autism.

Due to that, many parents miss that their daughters have autism, all because scientists never considered that the disorder might affect males and females very differently. For instance, females with autism might get through a school day with absolutely no problems, only to collapse into a violent, self-destructive outburst the instant they're alone in their rooms. Conversely, males with autism are comparatively easy to spot, as they are frequently followed by a laugh track on a Chuck Lorre sitcom.

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