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John Oliver on “Bias in Medicine”
If anyone caught the latest episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO, then you’re probably familiar with his discussion of bias in medicine. In the video (linked below), John Oliver discusses some of the race- and gender-based biases that a lot of women face when they go to see a doctor. More specifically, he talks about how women (particularly women of color) are often misdiagnosed or completely ignored.
John Oliver also makes a disclaimer (one that I’d agree with) that not every doctor has these biases. Rather, there are systemic problems within medicine that lead to these bias issues.
Video Source: Youtube (Last Week Tonight)
As a celiac/coeliac, I couldn’t not respond to this video. I started dealing with health issues when I was 17, and it took several years for me to get the medical treatment I needed.
My Experience with Bias in Medicine
Day-to-day, I tend to face some problems with being a female celiac (I’ve talked about some of these before). I look like what people tend to picture when we think of someone who doesn’t eat gluten (i.e. white, female, millennial), and this sometimes means that I’m served food that isn’t gluten-free or I have to work a little harder to prove that gluten is actually dangerous for me.
But John Oliver’s discussion of the bias in medicine reminded me of some of the more dangerous biases I’ve faced as a young woman with celiac disease.
My Celiac Disease Diagnosis
As I’ve talked about in my very first post on the Celiac Press, my celiac disease diagnosis process was long and frustrating. Most of this was because I had several doctors who refused to take me seriously when I told them about my sudden health problems.
In the very early stages, I had doctors just give me prescription after prescription without actually diagnosing me correctly. I had been sick with a virus, and they just kept giving me stronger antibiotics. When I was having serious negative side-effects from those antibiotics (which it turned out I was allergic to), they just thought I was being dramatic about my symptoms.
When shortly after this I started having crazy stomach pains and acid reflux, my doctor just gave me another prescription that only made me worse.
When I started thinking I might have food-related issues, that’s when I really started seeing how biased medicine can be. My doctor just said: “you’re young and healthy, so you’re probably just stressed out.” So, he sent me to a psychiatrist for my apparent “stress” (spoiler alert: it didn’t work).
One of the most frustrating parts of this problem was that along the way, my doctor did send me for celiac disease testing. However, he didn’t tell me all of the details of how the test worked. That is, he didn’t tell me that I needed to be eating gluten for the test to work. So, I got a false negative and just kept getting sicker. It wasn’t until I switched to a new doctor that I found out how this test was supposed to work and I got the right diagnosis.
Do I think there’s bias in medicine?
From my perspective, there are definitely doctors who don’t take patients like me seriously. I was only 17 when I started going through health problems, and until I switched to another doctor I didn’t realize how biased my previous doctor had been.
What doesn’t help is that celiac disease is an invisible illness. I looked healthy enough and I was young, so my doctor didn’t think that there was any way I could actually be sick. Rather, he thought that I was just stressed out and needed to talk about my feelings.
Since then, I have had better experiences with doctors when it comes to talking about my celiac disease or other health problems. Ten years after all my health problems began, I definitely know how to navigate these situations better. That being said, I don’t think that anyone should have to go through the same process that I did (or worse) or have to keep switching doctors until someone takes their medical concerns seriously.