For certain conditions, women are misdiagnosed more frequently than men and the consequences can be fatal.

According to the British Medical Journal, gender differences in detecting and treating heart attacks has led to women having significantly higher post-heart attack death rates than men. The article’s authors estimate that thousands of women’s deaths could have been prevented had care been equal between the sexes.  For instance, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reports that men get rushed to the catheterization lab quicker (“door-to-balloon time”) than women so that men’s blocked arteries get opened faster than women’s on average.

Dr. Alyson McGregor, an emergency medicine physician who often treats young female heart attack victims, points to the difference in heart attack symptoms of women vs. men as one cause of the treatment gap.  And all too often, she says, a woman’s heart attack is written off as anxiety or reflux.  She has worked to make her ER colleagues more aware of the different symptoms a woman experiencing a heart attack might have.

Why misdiagnosis is happening

There are two main reasons why women can get diagnostically shortchanged:

Healthcare provider lack of knowledge about the differences between men’s and women’s bodies – Men’s and women’s bodies are different in many more ways than most of us think.  Dr. Kim Templeton, past president of the American Medical Women’s Association and professor of orthopedic surgery at The University of Kansas Medical Center, says, “We now know that there are differences between the sexes in every health condition. Any organ system that you pick, any health condition that you pick.”  Dr. Templeton contends these differences are not taught by medical schools nor by continuing medical education courses.

Too much focus on doctors’ psychological observations of female patients to the neglect of physical ones – Women are more likely to be seen as anxious hypochondriacs by their doctors, who then might ascribe all of a woman’s symptoms to her perceived anxiety.  There are many conditions for which doctors are often too quick to blame a woman’s symptoms on anxiety or hypochondria due to subconscious gender bias.  This happens especially frequently with conditions where the cause is uncertain and that disproportionately afflict women, such as ME/CFS (often inaccurately referred to as chronic fatigue) and fibromyalgia.  As a result, sufferers have been fighting for years to get these frequently disabling conditions recognized as “real” diseases by physicians.

Besides ME/CFS and fibromyalgia, studies have shown that female sufferers of several other autoimmune conditions, endometriosis, thyroid disorders, and strokes also frequently receive an incorrect anxiety diagnosis initially.  And I’m sure studies will continue to reveal other conditions for which this is true.  

Healthcare needs to address this disturbing pattern of gender disparities in diagnostic accuracy ASAP and to do that requires deeper digging into the problem than just saying, “let’s combat sexism in medicine.”  What do you think?

In the next blog post, I will deconstruct the problem and examine several expert-recommended ways to help women’s doctors get to the right diagnosis…and faster.