Women's pain is frequently dismissed or underestimated by the medical establishment. Research into drugs and their effects often have few or no female subjects, meaning too little is known about symptoms specific to female-assigned bodies. So it's all too easy for doctors to treat those symptoms as psychological. Author Maya Dusenbery shares some disturbing stats from her research and what they mean for women's lives: how the average autoimmune patient goes four years and sees four doctors before receiving a diagnosis. How endometriosis affects one in 10 women, but takes patients over a decade to diagnose. Plus, how all this systemic pressure makes women feel like they have to be the perfect patient.

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