Doing Harm

Fascinating read. I had mysterious chest pains earlier this year (2020 man), so I waited a day, called the telenurse, made an appt at a walk-in, got sent to emerg, waited 9 hrs doing tests only to emerge around 1am after finding out nothing - but I probably wasn't dying of something they knew about! Glad I didn't get the run-around some of these women did. But does it ever entrench the mistrust of the medical system that only seems to want to know which drugs will make you go away. (Which is better than “go away you only want drugs!” But still not helpful)

Dusenbery runs through a number of illness and conditions that get misdiagnosed or ignored if women complain about having them and the general lack of sex analysed research to help define how certain illnesses and drugs reacted to female bodies and hormones. Some of this information I knew, but was explored in more depth and some I had no idea.

Ohhhhh my. This book was painfully long and repetitive. While the subject matter was interesting to me not only because I'm a woman, but because I have an autoimmune condition and there was a lot here that echoed my experiences, it just felt like she was saying the same things, telling too similar stories over and over again. The epilogue just felt like extending the book for the sake of making it longer. Even the title is too long!