Survey: how women (and our doctors) respond to early cardiac symptoms

May 26, 2024May 26, 2024 ~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

I have often written and spoken out about an alarming reality observed among women experiencing their first cardiac symptoms. Researchers call it “treatment-seeking delay behaviour”. One of several interesting studies on this particular tendency in female heart patients was published in The American Journal of Critical Care, for example. Oregon researchers reported that female heart patients are significantly more likely to delay seeking medical treatment compared to our male counterparts – yes, even in mid-heart attack. In fact, study authors identified six common patterns of decision-making delays between the time women first experience serious cardiac symptoms and the time when they go for help.(1) Those six patterns range from “minimizing symptoms” to “reluctance to ask others for help”.

But just in case these studies seem to suggest that women are to blame for poor cardiac outcomes because we wait too long, let’s look at how prepared our physicians are to assess cardiovascular risks in their female patients. The landmark Women’s Heart Alliance survey asked both female heart patients and physicians for their own perspectives – with surprising results, especially this particular finding:

Physicians may not feel as prepared as you think. .

Continue reading “Survey: how women (and our doctors) respond to early cardiac symptoms” →

When female doctors treat female patients

April 28, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 17 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Last week, I was re-reading a 2018 study that examined female survival rates following a heart attack diagnosis (a topic of great interest to me and other women whose cardiac symptoms have ever been misdiagnosed). Study authors explained what we already knew (“a large body of evidence suggests that women are less likely than men to survive traumatic health episodes like acute myocardial infarction).” There are lots of studies out there suggesting the same conclusion, but this research tracked both the outcomes of cardiac treatments and also whether the treating physician was male or female. Their conclusions raised an astonished eyebrow or two at the time (notably, in male physicians!) because researchers found that female heart patients who had been treated by female physicians had better survival outcomes than women treated by male docs. (There were some specific exceptions reported – if, for example, a male physician has had considerable experience working alongside female colleagues).

I’m guessing that many male physicians don’t like to entertain those kinds of study findings. . Continue reading “When female doctors treat female patients” →

How health journalists help “to make people who feel invisible feel seen”

January 14, 2024January 16, 2024 ~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

I was late in discovering the writing of Ed Yong. The British-American journalist had already been a staff writer at The Atlantic for six years before I first read one of his articles, but it was his rare ability to make the most complex science make sense which convinced me to start reading everything he wrote. Here’s how Ed’s own editors described his series of articles on the COVID pandemic which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2021: “Ed Yong anticipated the course of the coronavirus pandemic, clarified its dangers, and illuminated the government’s disastrous failure to curb it.”

One of the early issues that Ed Yong zeroed in on was that physicians seemed remarkably dismissive of people who were suffering terribly with what’s now called Long-COVID. But Ed and a small spattering of other science writers were taking those patient reports seriously. And in his regular newsletter, Ed described the important role of journalism as helping “to make people who feel invisible feel seen”.

Continue reading “How health journalists help “to make people who feel invisible feel seen”” →