French woman was told by doctors hantavirus symptoms were just anxiety
theguardian.comThe Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias against Women in the Treatment of Pain https://philpapers.org/rec/HOFTGW-3
Sex bias in pain management decisions https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401331121
Gender Bias and Diagnostic Delays in Young Women: A Narrative Review https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12829432/
There is a huge body of research that shows systematic downplaying, ignoring and rating women's health and pain concerns much lower than they are.
I can believe this. I know a lot of rural healthcare workers. The older farmer man type will not come in unless they're basically dying. They're taken seriously pretty much immediately in a way that would probably appear as sexist.
> This article, headlined “French woman was told by doctors hantavirus symptoms were just anxiety”, was removed on 12 May 2026 after the Guardian was notified of a fundamental misunderstanding of remarks from Javier Padilla Bernáldez. The Spanish health secretary had been describing a separate case involving a person who was not confirmed to have hantavirus, not the French woman who had tested positive after evacuation from the ship.
I had all sorts of real physical symptoms that I spent years going to doctors for. Some of them took me seriously. Some told me it is in my head.
If I had ChatGPT, I would have solved them much earlier and lived a better life.
it’s stories like these similar to mine that make me seriously hope doctors become a thing of the past eventually. there’s too much arrogance and too many gaps of knowledge in the medical field for me to believe in the reliability or integrity of the field anymore in my own personal experience
As long as people get hurt and there's research to do, doctors are not going anywhere. Maybe the profession will change, but having a dedicated person/team of people for healthcare is something I think that will stick around for a long while.
They also have to meet like 20 different patients a day. They want you out of their office in 15 minutes. I always felt pressured and didn't have any time to explain.