American healthcare doesn’t adequately care for women
As someone who has had a bad experience with birth control, I have really begun to question how thoughtfully women are considered in healthcare.
My bad experience involved the Nexplanon implant. I had my period for months straight with the only solutions being to take an oral contraceptive along with the implant (which I tried without success) or the total removal of said implant.
The implant I had was 99% effective, so for a long time I was in a difficult place of switching to a less effective method or dealing with the horrible side effects. Now, some people might say, why not switch to an intrauterine device (IUD)? With the bad luck I had with the arm implant, and terrible stories I’ve heard about IUDs, I decided I did not want something painfully inserted into my uterus with the possibility of it being taken right back out if something went wrong.
I’ve come to find out situations like mine—and ones that are even worse—are commonplace with individuals who take birth control. The side effects page is like a book, but no one seems to really care. What’s even more troubling is that male birth control attempts have been halted for the same side effects as birth control that has been approved for women.
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Under representation of women in research leads to poor birth control methods.
Julie Beck references in her article “The Different Stakes of Male and Female Birth Control” that, “In the male birth control trial, 4.7 percent of men experienced mood swings, and 2.8 percent experienced depression.” These were two of the side effects cited as reasons for ending the trial.
On the other hand, let’s take Liletta, an IUD approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015— 5.2% of its users experienced mood swings, and 5.4% experienced depression, yet we don’t see the same outcomes as the male birth control trial. Unfortunately, there have been many instances like this, and women’s health is neglected in comparison to men.
It doesn’t end with birth control; I’ve come to find that women’s health in general has been given much less attention and research when compared to men. In the United States, research trials weren’t required to include women until 1993. This was justified by the idea that women's bodies were too complex due to fluctuating hormones. Professor Kate Leslie notes in her research article “Why are Women Ignored by Medical Research?” that medical research is largely conducted by men, on men, for men.
Of course, this leaves women more at risk. For things such as heart attack, women are less likely to experience the well-known symptoms—the symptoms which were discovered by men in research with most participants being men. Autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer’s disease and chronic pain conditions are all more likely to affect women, and these conditions often go under-researched, undiagnosed and untreated.
When considering intersectionality, BIPOC women are even more neglected within the healthcare system as stereotypes and biases permeate the system. Transgender and intersex individuals also face issues with discriminatory beliefs and practices in healthcare along with immense underrepresentation in medical research.
In 2022, the American healthcare system must do better and truly work towards eliminating biases and disparities. Adequate healthcare should be a right for all, and the current state of the American healthcare system just isn’t cutting it when it is perfectly capable of doing so if given the attention and funding.