Sitting in the consulting room in June 2024, my eyebrows shot straight up.
I’d managed to grab an urgent appointment at my doctor’s surgery – but the physician’s assistant’s opening gambit was to tell me that my name was ‘sexy’.
The fact I had gone in for a gynaecological complaint only amplified the embarrassment I felt.
I stared at him in shock but didn’t say anything, as I was too embarrassed. I felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
I replayed the mortifying interaction in my mind the whole way home and when I told my husband, anger crept in.
As a disabled woman, chronically ill with incurable, progressive conditions including hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) and endometriosis, my need for medical support is higher than most – but this support is so often lacking in male physicians.
My symptoms were dismissed for 11 years by a male GP before I was finally taken seriously – after I threatened to sue the doctor if it turned out to be some terminal gynaecological cancer.
I was finally referred and surgical investigation found I had stage 4 endometriosis. By that point my fertility had been totally destroyed, my bladder, bowel and reproductive organs permanently damaged.
I also went through 22 years of crippling pain before hEDS was finally diagnosed – by a woman.
And in recent years I’ve felt an almost universal negative shift in attitude from male physicians to women.
In late 2020, a doctor labelled me ‘a paranoid medical journalist’ to another, who then dismissed my lung infection as anxiety. A visit to A&E and a CT scan later found a large area of infection in my lungs, which took multiple courses of antibiotics to shift.
I made a complaint, and found out my doctor had made this remark by his own admission. He apologised for his inaccurate and ‘unhelpful labelling’, which had compromised my care and prejudiced another doctor.
As well as this, a rheumatologist I waited three years to see in June 2024 said: ‘So what?’ when I described the level of pain I was coping with and how much I was struggling. He said this to me at least four times, then bizarrely advised – as he put it, ‘off the record’ – to ‘have a baby’ as that ‘would help’.
I said, ‘I can’t have another baby. I am in pain and last time, pregnancy tore my hip cartilage. I needed two operations to fix it’ – to which he repeated, ‘So what?’.
In the last year alone, a male spinal specialist was so aggressive to me ahead of an invasive procedure that my husband, who witnessed it, insisted we cancel for my safety.
We’d complained about a previous treatment he’d ordered, which included having an enormous needle put through the front of my neck while I was awake in the theatre and could feel everything. The experience was excruciating and I was not taken seriously.
Now, we were face to face and the spinal specialist was angry that we’d had the impertinence to complain about him. We had expected him to be humble, kind and compassionate but he was the complete opposite and so angry.
More recently still, a male paediatric consultant became so annoyed when I asked questions about my daughter’s upcoming surgery under general anaesthesia that he refused to look at, or talk directly, to me – looking over my head, and ‘answering’ my husband instead.
That consultant actually had the audacity to question why I knew to ask what I did.
If you are a woman who knows anything about your symptoms then God help you, because male medics will likely treat you with suspicion and contempt.
I find this particularly galling given how often GPs have Googled my symptoms in plain sight, or stated entirely wrong information.
In the last three months, two male doctors prescribed me new medications that produced awful interactions with my existing medicines. I only realised what was going on because I Googled it and found a research paper.
I told my GP who said, ‘oh yes’, and advised me to stop them immediately.
I have had it with the swathes of misogynistic male doctors in the NHS and private care, and from now on will either travel out of my area or pay hundreds I cannot afford to receive adequate care. ,
And while I am sure there are many competent male doctors, and incompetent female ones, I’ve been burned too often for me to dismiss these failures as isolated one-offs.
It’s easy to hear stories like mine and jump to the conclusion that I am the problem – but I am not an anomaly.
A UK Parliament committee reported in December that women and girls in the UK are suffering pain unnecessarily and going undiagnosed for years.
Take endometriosis, for example. A 2024 report by Endometriosis UK found that 47% of respondents had visited their GP 10 or more times before getting a diagnosis; while 70% had visited five times or more.
Plus, 78% had experienced one or more doctors telling them they were making a ‘fuss about nothing’ (or an equivalent comment) before later being given a formal diagnosis of endometriosis.
Women everywhere are being badly let down while medical misogyny is dancing around, laughing in our faces.
In my case, it has directly led to poor medical outcomes and twice resulted in physical injury – the neck injury, and another occasion where I had to have a painful hysteroscopy without sedation.
It seems unbelievable that these attitudes could possibly have a place in modern medicine – but the impact of it is far reaching for women and has been devastating for me.
I suffer high pain and a myriad of disruptive symptoms 24/7, yet I find it hard to seek medical help because I am fearful of how I will be treated.
My partial joint dislocations go unchecked. My pain and declining mobility continue to crunch down my world from ‘small’ to ever tinier. My quality of life is now what I can only describe as ‘very poor’, and I am mostly confined by the four walls of my home.
Is it any wonder that chronically ill women like me must have a deeper understanding of our conditions to protect us – and our children – from the missteps, misdiagnoses and rampant misogyny from male medics?
Despite being fiercely independent, I now take my husband with me as a witness and for moral support to all medical appointments in case another menace rears his ugly head.
I have lost my agency, autonomy and confidence – so now, I am switching to female-only care, unless I am in a medical emergency.
Metro have approached the Department of Health and Social Care for comment and will update this article if they respond
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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