Virginia Injury Lawyer Blog
This Gallup and Pivotal research report, “Barriers to Care, Barriers to Opportunity,” addresses serious issues regarding women’s health care. One of the primary findings is that 51 percent of women report an experience such as having symptoms dismissed, being misdiagnosed or not getting needed answers, compared with 39 percent of men. In our firm’s medical malpractice work, we have seen far too many cases where women’s complaints were undervalued or ignored. We have had several undiagnosed stroke cases involving young women “who don’t have strokes”–well they can and do. For example, one young woman went to the ER after a softball game injury, complaining of headache and difficulty walking. Most likely because she was young, her symptoms weren’t taken seriously and she was discharged from the hospital ER with the diagnosis of dehydration and vertigo, when in fact she’d suffered an ischemic stroke. She now lives with the serious deficits caused by the stroke. Had she been treated promptly with medication, she would have avoided resulting deficits. We’ve had two other, nearly identical failure to diagnose stroke cases where the female patient’s complaints were dismissed. In a failure to diagnose cancer case, a woman was told that the lump in her breast was likely benign and not to worry about it, as she was young and had dense breast tissue. Treated at that point, her cancer was curable. It wasn’t, and grew to be a Stage IV metastatic mass.