I can tell you my period cramps most of the time feel equivalent to digesting a dozen Lego bricks, but I’ll probably never take painkillers despite the pain.
It doesn't matter if it's Tylenol or Advil, you won’t be able to convince me to take tablets for temporary relief.
Social norms, on top of the screaming pain in my uterus, are just not enough to convince me to take them.
I don’t understand why women are expected to medicate or readjust their bodies to work in a society that doesn’t adapt to their needs.
Men have the option of getting vasectomies, however it has only been recently talked about as an option of birth control – it usually falls on women to handle the consequences of sex.
Unfortunately, the gap between men and women is beyond wages and orgasms. It also exists in medical research, according to a Aug. 12, 2020 article by Berkeley News.
“When it comes to prescribing drugs, a one-size-fits-all approach, based on male-dominated clinical trials, is not working, and women are getting the short end of the stick,” said study lead author Irving Zucker, a professor emeritus of psychology and of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, in the article.
In 2021, over 8,000,000 women in America were vaccinated against COVID-19, according to a Feb. 5, 2021 report from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
After they were vaccinated, many started sharing online that they were experiencing unusual symptoms in their menstruation cycles, according to a July 20, 2022 video from Vice News.
Kathryn Clancy, an associate professor in anthropology from the University of Illinois, made a Twitter post on Feb. 24, 2021 reporting, “I’m a week and a half out from dose 1 of Moderna, got my period maybe a day or so early, and [I] am gushing like I’m in my 20s again.”
Other women responded to her tweet and said they experienced similar symptoms.
Women were also reporting they were experiencing their period for the first time, despite already having gone through menopause, according to Vice News.
According to Vice News, medical experts and reporters wrote off women for making assumptions and false connections between the vaccine and their period symptoms.
This is not the first time doctors and scientists appeared to have minimal care for women’s health.
Before they were able to sell the abortion pill to women all across America, scientists needed to test the medication to see if the drug was safe.
In 1955, American biologist Gregory Pincus traveled to Puerto Rico to experiment with early versions of the abortion pill using human trials, according to an article from PBS.
According to the same source, the Puerto Rican women in the first trial welcomed the birth control pill as an alternative to sterilization or abortion. Many women in the community depended on other forms of birth control to limit their family size.
During the trial, women in these studies complained they were experiencing nausea, dizziness, headaches, stomach pain and vomiting.
Three women also died during the trial.
However, instead of responding to their concerns, Pincus and his research partner recorded these symptoms as psychosomatic.
Psychosomatic disorder is a psychological condition where people experience physical symptoms without any medical explanation, according to a website from the Cleveland Clinic.
Decades later, the same women reported they were falsely informed the pills they took were meant to prevent pregnancy, according to PBS.
The women were initially told they were taking the pill to prevent pregnancy, not to have abortions.
They were also not told they were part of a clinical trial and that the pills they took could have given them potentially dangerous side effects.
Unfortunately, these experiences are technically a privilege in comparison to the medical research that was available for women before the 1990s.
Women were not allowed to be part of scientific or medical trials until 1993 because researchers were concerned that women would become less fertile after these trials, according to a Dec. 18, 2019 article by the Guardian.
Before 1993, women were excluded from medical research trials because researchers claimed their bodies were too hormonally complex to do studies on.
Women who were still able to carry a child were also kept out of medical trials because researchers were concerned they may accidentally expose pregnant women to untested drugs and risk hurting their child, according to Berkeley News.
This means before 1993, doctors in America did not have reliable research to inform their female patients.
Unfortunately, this history may have left women in our generation with some consequences.
Studies showed when men and women were given the same drug dose, the women’s blood tests showed they had higher concentrations of the drug, according to two researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago in the same Berkeley News article.
Senior public health student Kayla Lam said it also aligns with how people with a lower body weight tend to be more sensitive to medication. In general, most women have less weight in comparison to men.
Lam also said women are more likely to have their pain disregarded in comparison to men.
“It's common where a lot of female patients come in and they see them. It's disregarded, most of the time,” Lam said.
Lam said during the ‘70s, black women were given thicker needles because doctor’s assumed they had a higher pain tolerance.
Medicine is also still catching up on researching the differences between men and women in certain medical conditions.
Lam said women are more likely to be misdiagnosed when they have a heart attack because of a lack of awareness in differentiating symptoms.
Lam explained the symptoms most medical professionals pay attention to are typically only expressed in men, not in women.
This means most women will either be misdiagnosed with significant conditions or ignored until it’s too late.
According to a March 25, 2017 article from Harvard, most women said their physicians misdiagnosed them with panic disorder, stress or having hypochondria after sharing similar symptoms to having a heart attack.
Lam said these problems exist beyond medical research.
She said this type of gender discrimination can be felt both in and outside the doctor’s office.
“There's a connection between the lack of understanding that when a woman takes a medication, for example, birth control, there are serious side effects, but it seems like most of society tends to assume that's not the case,” Lam said.
Lam said she had a friend who went to their OB-GYN. At the doctor’s office, she learned that her previous doctor had been prescribing her a type of birth control for much longer than what is recommended by most medical professionals.
“You should not be using [type of birth control] for more than like, two, three years, but she's been using it for eight years,” Lam said. “That's totally malpractice.”
Lam said these types of medications come with serious side effects.
She said her friend is in the process of suing her previous doctor who prescribed her the medication.
More research and education needs to be done to help female patients gain a better understanding of their bodies.
The problem with medical research on the female body is not because scientists and doctors did not study hard enough in school.
It’s most likely because of a lack of representation of women medical professionals and stigmas against the legitimacy of women’s issues.
The majority of medical professionals are still men.
According to a report from the Associate of American Medical Colleges, 56% of medical professionals are Caucasian, while 64% are male.
This means women, especially women of color, have less voices in the medical field.
This may also connect to why stigmas around women are still prevalent in the medical field.
For generations, women have been denied care because of stigmas of how sensitive they are to pain.
According to a May 28, 2018 article from BBC, a 2015 study showed female cancer patients had to wait longer and had to experience symptoms for a longer period of time until they received a diagnosis, in comparison to men in six out of 11 different types of cancers.
Fortunately, this is slowly changing.
For example, in 2021 female researchers Katherine Lee, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Washington, and Clancy began researching how the COVID-19 vaccine affects a woman's menstruation cycle, according to Vice.
Both researchers said they started to question if there was any research after they started to experience symptoms.
Lee said she started asking questions when she and a friend of hers, who coincidentally got the COVID-19 vaccine on the same day, were texting.
During their text exchange both women shared that they were experiencing new period symptoms.
After this text exchange, Lee said she reached out to Clancy, who was also experiencing new period symptoms, and decided to start doing research after other women started posting on social media reporting they were experiencing symptoms, while also criticizing the scientific community.
“It was clear that this was an emerging issue,” Clancy said. “If anyone was going to be paying attention, it was going to be us.”
Around 2021, Lee and Clancy began gathering data.
A year later, news organizations like NBC began publishing news articles reporting that new period symptoms were not made up, they were more common than what initially researchers thought.
Researchers like Lee and Clancy are an example of why women need to not only push for more research representing their bodies, but also more representations within the medical field itself.
