racheldida's review against another edition

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hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

georgialily789's review

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informative slow-paced

4.75

sellnow_hannah's review against another edition

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slow-paced

2.0

I am both a healthcare professional (family practice PA) and a woman who's had negative experiences as a patient. 

Sex and gender bias is a significant problem in medicine and an important one to explore. But I found this book needlessly repetitive and while well researched, its clear the author has limited experience in the field so some of her points are off-base:

- She seems to assert that mental health problems can't cause physical symptoms and wants providers to keep ordering tests indefinitely to find a physical cause, which in practice often doesn't make sense and is wildly expensive. 
- she seems to not realize that the vast majority of clinicians are not researchers so we follow established guidelines instead of going rogue and ordering tests insurance won’t pay for.  
- her discussion about opioids lacked nuance. We are in the midst of an opioid crisis and she barely skimmed the challenges providers have in treating pain in the context of the opioid epidemic. 
- she did not even mention the way the medical establishment forces providers to see more and more patients in less and less time as a reason patients feel dismissed and not heard. Then she blames that dismissal on individual providers instead of the medical system that completely over works providers and expects us to somehow do complex and thorough care in a 15 minute appointment. 
- the tone of the writing was pretty angry and based on outrage  which for me as a healthcare provider was hard to read and not take a just little personally. 

Read for League of Women Voters of Larimer County Informed Citizens Book Club

11corvus11's review against another edition

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3.0

DNF. I refuse to sit through "feminist" book in which the author argues that we need to torture and kill more female laboratory animals. Aside from the ridiculous association between feminism and promoting the nonconsensual exploitation, violation, and killing of female bodies, the author does not seem to grasp the problems with extrapolating data from studies on nonhuman animals to women. Even extrapolation from rats to mice won't match up much of the time.

If you want a book about this topic, check out Michele Lent Hirsch's "Invisible." It has a very small section near the end that discusses the abuse of female animals but it's not fighting for it like this author did.

It's a shame since this book has some good things to offer. It's just not the best of the best on this topic.

alexisrt's review

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4.0

This is an important book on the gender gap in medicine. Maya Dusenbery identifies two main gaps: the knowledge gap and the trust gap. Medicine still lags in including women in clinical trials and in researching conditions that occur only in, more frequently in, or differently in women. Secondly, doctors distrust women, discount their reporting of their symptoms, and ascribe women's pain as psychological--despite data showing that women are not more emotional, are not drug seekers, and do not seek medical care more readily than men. This bias is compounded for women of color and women who are overweight, and it's not just in the US (the book is US centric, but there are multiple examples of the same behavior from other countries.

Most of this book is great, if enraging, but it's not perfect. In order to keep the book manageable, it's selective. Routine gynecological and maternity care is excluded, as is anything psychiatric. Dusenbery is aggressive on the history of hysteria and its transformation into somatoform disorder--the latter is largely dismissed as a new way to disbelieve women. Her interest is solely in the physical--her focuses are on heart disease, autoimmune disease, and pain disorders. She's so intent to believe that bias is the root of all evil that she sometimes gets into dicey territory on science. I have thyroid disease and I've seen the downside of aggressive patient advocacy for treatment--I wouldn't rely on Mary Shomon. Similarly, she treats the chronic Lyme controversy as solely a question of doctors refusing to believe women, and as someone who's followed that debate for years I'm less convinced. She doesn't criticize "Lyme literate" doctors who charge $12,000 for months of antibiotics that aren't proven to work and who prey on women in their own way. The problem with medicine being lousy is that the alternatives are worse.

Overall, though, a great read.

mscalls's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.25


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beetree's review

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challenging informative sad slow-paced

3.5

This is a really important book but I found it dry and repetitive, despite being passionate about this topic. It’s structure and formatting (very long chapters sometimes) didn’t work for me and because of the repetition, I sometimes lost the point of the chapters.

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whatacuriousnotion's review

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informative sad medium-paced

4.0

becs93's review against another edition

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informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

catinarage's review

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1.0

The topic is interesting but I wasn’t able to finish the last 100 pages. It became too dry.