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What’s sad is how hard would it have been for just a single one of them to say “…but we should send you for an image just in case”
The strange thing here is that in America there's a better chance they might have found it earlier--if only because they're gung-ho on testing because they can bill for it.
Agreed, if she had insurance. And it didn't get denied by AI.
I hate this place
In America, you're more likely to get the test ordered (for a myriad of reasons, billing is one, but also malpractice) but also to have it be denied by insurance.
In a country like Canada, the challenge would be getting the test ordered but once you do, the only question is when it can be done.
This is very accurate. Highlights the cons of each system. The grass isn't always greener.
Any time my wife has been given the run around by doctors, I usually ask for her to schedule another appointment so I can be there, and I demand the doctors put notes, make something on the record that they SPECIFICALLY ARE DENYING TESTING and the reason behind it before I will leave.
So far it's worked every time to get them to just do the goddamn test, take the fucking scan, or do some simple blood work.
Doctors like that are more afraid of malpractice suits than they are of killing a patient over negligence.
The first time it happened was because she had cholecystitis and the doctor was insisting she was too young to have any issues with it, but I was older and had already had my gallbladder removed over it several years before. So I knew the signs, I knew the feeling, and I had doctors from the same hospital ignore my symptoms. Once the demand for notes to be recorded, suddenly everyone is all for doing a simple scan and what do you know, her gallbladder is filled with sludge and stones, neither of which should be there, and it's swelling. A week later it was out, but they wanted to wait 6 months "to wait and see if you're still having discomfort"
To anyone who has never had gallstones, it's like someone is taking a glowing hot knife and stabbing you from just above the stomach toward your spine. It's "discomfort" the way giving birth is "mild pain"
Demand tests and demand records of test denials. Fear of lawsuits and losing licenses goes a lot further than "you're a doctor who is supposed to help people get better" to some.
That can be effective in the US but would generally not work in Canada where malpractice suits are uncommon.
In Canada you may have better luck pursuing a complaint to the province's licensing authority.
As a healthcare provider (HCP) I would generally try to dissuade patients from exaggerating or overstating. Most doctors and nurses have dealt with enough people that we have a good sense of when someone is exaggerating or even outright lying. Usually it is counterproductive and decreases the chance that your concern or complaint will be addressed appropriately.
I would advocate for centering the conversation on how symptoms have changed / affected your quality of life. A good HCP would make this part of the coversation but I know that not all of my colleagues do so, especially in light of corporate or governmental pressure to see as many patients in as fast as possible.
I feel/have _____ when I do _____ and I'm worried that it will continue, impairing my ability to _____ is a general approach.
As someone who heard several accounts from people with endometriosis, I get the feeling that a lot of healthcare professionals are severely overestimating their own ability to "have a good sense when someone is exagerating". The stories these women tell are absolutely infuriating, and the diagnosis rate vs prevalence of the disease just as much. Clearly many doctors are simply dismissing complaints about period pain out of hand.
IDK, I know nothing about healthcare but shouldn't complaints about pain be objectivized a little bit? Like can't you just slap me in the face and ask which hurts more? Because I feel like doctors would often be surprised by the kind of pain some chronically ill people put up with without showing any external signs.
As someone who heard several accounts from people with endometriosis, I get the feeling that a lot of healthcare professionals are severely overestimating their own ability to "have a good sense when someone is exagerating".
I've had a gynecologist tell his resident that it's a good idea to train the patients on how to answer questions. It never crossed his mind to listen to women first.
As a healthcare worker with autoimmune disease and chronic pain, I hear where you're coming from. The job would be a lot of easier if pain could be measured objectively. Everyone has a different tolerance for pain and chronic pain makes it all the more unpredictable.
The average time to diagnosis for endometriosis is 4 to 8 years. It's a notoriously difficult diagnosis that often cant be made definitively without some form of invasive testing (which is taught in medical school). But, regardless of vocation, education cannot completely correct bias and there is lot of room for improvement in healthcare when it comes to women's health.
The arrogance of some doctors can be scary. I used to be a clinical genetic counselor, a job specifically designed to focus on working with doctors as a genetics specialist so that they don't need to know all the intricacies of that on top of everything else. Most doctors I worked with hated me, and saw me as a distraction from work they could handle on their own.
One time a doctor went over my head to order a genetic test for a patient who had a very strong family history of breast cancer. He didn't refer her for a genetic counseling session, which was the protocol so that we could explain to her her own risk and the potential positive result, and give her the option to make an informed choice about whether or not she wanted testing at all. He just offered her the test out of the blue and, not really knowing what it meant, she just accepted by default. Not only did she test positive for a BRCA1 mutation, increasing her lifetime risk of developing breast cancer to over 90%, but the doctor incorrectly interpreted the results of the test, and believed she tested positive for breast cancer itself.
I only learned about the patient because the doctor mentioned her nonchalantly during a review meeting, and I had to correct him about the results of the test and convince him to refer her to me. I think the only reason he agreed was because he was put on the spot in front of the whole oncology department. I was lucky that the doctor hadn't yet incorrectly reported to the patient that she had breast cancer, but I still had to inform this woman, who barely understood why she was here, that she'll likely want to start scheduling yearly mammograms right now, or even consider a mastectomy, while she was still in college. That was the most difficult day of my short time in the field, and a big reason for why I ultimately left.
I am confused. Outside of not following the rules and reading the test results incorrectly, it sounds as if him giving her the test was a positive thing? Isn't it good that this was caught early? Sorry, maybe it's how I am reading it, but you sound upset that she even received this diagnosis. I also get that the end doesn't justify the means, but it sounds like catching this early can really help her life long-term.
Oh, no, the diagnosis isn't the bad thing, the process by which the patient received it is the bad thing. Genetic testing is a big decision, since it not only affects the patient's entire life, but also the lives of their family members. It's not something you want the patent to suddenly be informed of out of the blue without even fully understanding that they were being tested in the first place. This patient had no time to prepare for the possibility that she could have a high lifetime cancer risk, and didn't even know what that would mean until she already had the result.
This woman went from a normal college student with normal worries to someone who now has to worry about whether or not she wants to risk keeping her breast tissue to maybe one day breastfeed a baby, or simply feel like herself when she looks in the mirror. She has to think about whether she wants to have kids at all because they'd have a 50% chance of inheriting the same mutation. Every time she touches her own breasts for the rest of her life she's going to be scared that she feels a lump.
It's good that she got a diagnosis, but a lot of people choose not to, or at least choose to have it at a time when they're ready to focus on it, and this woman was denied that. She could have simply gotten more mammograms without testing right now, for example, because her family history put her in higher risk in its own. She wasn't even given a heads up that she might be thrust into this reality - the doctor was thinking about her physical well-being, but ignored her mental well-being. That's what the genetic counselors are supposed to be there for, but he ignored us, and the patent suffered for it. A woman walked into my office thinking everything was fine, and walked out with a world of worries on her shoulders.
This makes sense! Thank you for explaining. As someone who works in the medical world, but in IT, I know of this position. Where I work they are called genetic counselors and are very sought after. So much so they were the first department to ever allow remote work because it was impossible to find a team local. I wanna say half the staff worked out of Canada as well. I knew the jist of what they did, but this shines even more light on it.
Anecdotally - I’ve heard that a lot of genetics classes won’t have students test themselves, not just because “surprise! you are extremely likely to die of cancer” but also “surprise! you were assigned female at birth but are XY” wasn’t appropriate in a class. Can you speak to that?
That “do you really want to know” question is a lot harder than people think - I did 23andme a few years ago and found out that my mother had been lying about my father for almost thirty years. I was apparently enough Native American the entire time, I could have qualified for college scholarships :(
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It's a thing everywhere that women are routinely told "it's anxiety / depression" etc, and aren't listened to. It takes years longer for women to receive diagnosis for anything. Advocate for the women in your life. Go to doctors appointments with them. Apparently if a man goes with them, they'll, more likely be listened to, team up with someone who won't take no for an answer. It's not just the car dealerships that women face issues, it's everywhere.
I can confirm this from first hand experience. The doctor's office I was seeing wouldn't answer my very basic questions, almost comically choosing to ignore or deflect me. I called my dad, he asked the same questions, and immediately got answered. I asked them why they wouldn't tell me that and they couldn't explain themselves. They gave me a halfhearted apology and I found a new doctor.
Similar story, my ex had health issues most of her life and her doctors kept missing what was going on, partially because they didn't believe her about some things. One doctor deciding to investigate instead of dismissing saved her life when he found out her birth control was killing her, though her gp at the time still wanted her to finish the course.
That same gp also didn't believe she was actually dislocating her limbs until she finally just did it in front of him and he changed his tune right away (though still didn't really help).
Later she had a new better gp as well as a good idea of what chronic issue she had, but he still resisted when she was pushing for a diagnosis. I just came along for one appointment and when he said something like "this isn't a clear sign that you have ", I asked what evidence was he considering that pointed at her not having it. He then admitted he didn't know much about the condition and would do some research. After doing some reading, he was quick to give her a referral to a clinic that specialized in the condition because apparently he needed to be asked about his reasoning from a man to even bother learning about the condition that matched her experience very well and that she was later diagnosed with a severe form of.
I think AIs will be great for diagnosis because they will be able to cut out the biases doctors have against ever suspecting a rare case or giving women any consideration deeper than "stress".
It's simpler to say that doctors are morons. And I mean that in a very real sense, I suspect that part of medical school is a lobotomy. Without fail, doctors have been some of the dimmest brutes humanity has to offer.
It works for trans men too. If I go to the Urgent Care, I will get better care if I can remain stealth.
These people shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine.
Even their doctors aren't educated...
Where do you think Montreal is?
Right after Monduoal and Monunal
Probably assumed it was in the US lol
Yep, and its true if it weren’t a money maker like imaging they might find it difficult to get a proper diagnosis in the US, but I’m willing to bet the otherwise great healthcare systems in many developed nations still dismiss women’s health concerns with unfortunate regularity, even in 2025.
Dismissing women's health concerns is a consequence of dismissing women, an issue no culture on earth has overcome.
Too true, and I do trust we will. Every new generation is socialized a bit differently than the last. Hopefully we’re passing along fewer of these biases to the next.
Not so certain about English speaking countries due to the manosphere and surge of conservatism / 'traditional values' among young men but we can hope.
yup, especially things like heart attack which can be atypical in woman.
Youth lowers the odds, yes, but that’s statistics not people. You still do the full work up if there are concerns.
ive seen alot of these videos"too young to have this type of cancer" triple negative and inflammatory breast cancer is more prevelant in younger woman, reasons are unknown.
triple negatives which means they wont respond to hormonal therapy like estrogen.
once saw an episode of a show that shows rare disease, and IBC was one of them.
and doctors tend to ignore symptoms of a uncommon disease thats mean for older people, they are not used to it, unless the doctor have seen many patients with breast cancer.
I would blame this less on doctors and more on insurance providers and hospital administrators that deny certain tests.
Testing for a cancer diagnosis is FAR more expensive when the result is positive.
She died because the healthcare system around her would like to avoid paying for the treatment of her.
This is in Canada, insurance would not have been a roadblock.
Forgive my ignorance, but is that how things work over in Canada? I always heard this sort of thing in the US but I heard Canada does stuff differently?
Yes, we do things differently. Things are almost always covered by healthcare that are needed. We don't go bankrupt seeing the doctor usually like our southern neighbors might
I have a 22 year old friend who just got a double mastectomy because her biopsy came back positive.
Damn, that's terrible. I hope they recover ok, i can't imagine how traumatic their experience had been. Take good care of her ❤️
The big trauma was the lead up to the biopsy where she couldn't get screened because she didn't have money for it, and Planned Parenthood wasn't willing to do the breast cancer screening for someone crossing state lines, and her home state had blocked all Planned Parenthood clinics because America is a conservative hellscape. She moved states, immediately got screened, was found to have breast cancer, got treated, and is honestly extremely relieved that the journey is over. Every so often she talks to my wife about a pic on instagram she found while she was boob shopping because she's trying to decide what size fake boobs she wants
Like. You're absolutely right it was terrifying and stressful, and in many ways continues to be, but the worst parts of the experience are over and she's starting the journey of the best parts at this point
the worst parts of the experience are over and she's starting the journey of the best parts at this point
I'm relieved to hear that. Sound like she's got a good head on her shoulders, i wish her the best!
Too young? When in the history of ever have diseases discriminated based on age?
Honestly, all the time. Even some types of cancer can be more or less severe based on age. Obviously not in this case.
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I heard good things about healthcare in Canada. I come from a country that also has universal healthcare, but doctors are paid measly wages and results are what you pay for. 4-5 hours waits at emergency rooms, doctors and nurses refusing to do more than the bare minimum, or not event that, unless you give them a little "incentive", etc, etc. So actually good doctors go to practice in private clinics or other countries, where they're paid properly. I have lots of horror stories from the healthcare system in my native country.
But I thoght that Canada properly funds their healthcare system and this stuff wouldn't happen.
But I thoght that Canada properly funds their healthcare system and this stuff wouldn't happen.
Buddy, Canada has the second worst healthcare system among high income countries, behind only the shitstain that is the US system.
The system is so underfunded that wait times are abysmal and doctors/nurses leave in droves to avoid dealing with consequences of underfunding.
People believe all kinds of bullshit about Canadian healthcare. We have an awful healthcare system. I have had to forgo treatments because I couldn't afford them. Many things aren't covered under provincial healthcare plans, many ERs regularly suspend service due to being shortstaffed (which has led to many deaths), we have more and more private health clinics that charge exorbitant fees for basic services, we have systemic discrimination against women and racialized people, and we have relatively high rates of medical bankruptcy. The whole system is fucked.
God, it's so fucked that somehow your system is better than ours (USA) in most cases and certainly general affordability and it's still that bad.
Fucking wild. I suppose like everything else it's a spectrum for people's experiences and depends on the province and local govt.
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this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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