karnythia:

rogueavantgarde:

dynastylnoire:

wickedkhaleesi:

philosopher–queens:

thepageofhopes:

dottewa:

prokopetz:

feminerds:

hyggehaven:

witwitch:

sweetpotatodotcom:

newtonssidekick:

sweetpotatodotcom:

The medical community on literally every female specific health issue ever: “very common condition” “no known cause” “no known cure” :))))))

What the fuck is tumblr? Like honestly what is this? Do you guys pull shit out of the inner most depths of your rectum and then just throw it on your keyboard and have it turn into a post???? This site is something else what the fuck is wrong with you people????!?!?

Endemetriosis

Vaginal Thrush

Menorrhagia

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Fibroids

Very common conditions, causes are unknown or only speculated, long term cures have not been found. Most can cause chronic pain or discomfort, all can seriously impact your quality of life.

Men are so damn privileged they can’t even imagine female bodies have different healthcare needs than theirs and that our healthcare needs are important even if they can’t be affected by one of these conditions.

Endometriosis causes excruciating pain and is a leading cause of infertility. Thrush is extremely uncomfortable, and expensive to treat repeatedly; over-the-counter preparations rarely completely eradicate it. Menorrhagia, which I have, makes you anæmic. PCOS causes hormonal symptoms that are socially difficult (facial hair, acne, hair loss, weight gain). Fibroids are so common, and are often treated with a hysterectomy.

Add in fibromylgia, which affects 8x as many women as men, as well as lupus (and almost any other autoimmune condition), systemic exertion intolerance disorder (SEID), iron deficiency anæmia (all of which affect more women than men), and you have well over 25% of childbearing-age women globally living with chronic pain and tiredness.

Chronic pain is overwhelmingly experienced by women, and women are less likely to be taken seriously or given treatment by medical professionals. I went through two years of diagnostics to finally find out I had occipital neuralgia; I felt doubted when I described my pain at every step of the way, but was lucky to have a partner who was persistent in helping me get treatment.

Basically, this is a huge problem, and also one of the reasons I have been considering medical school.

Don’t forget that most pharmaceuticals go to market without ever having been tested on people with a uterus, lest someone get pregnant… seriously that is the whole rationale behind not testing >50% of the population. This has been legislated against in some countries, but still persists in the of majority drug development because of other regulations, and traditions and laziness. The use of a drug is of course monitored in the population after release, but the people “trying” it in this capacity get none of the insurance, close and regular medical examination or monetary benefit of essentially being in a late stage drug trial. Drugs that are pulled from market after release are sometimes done so on the basis that the dosage is just too high for females/afab people and this is, of course, after they’ve experienced the adverse affects. 

This is why if you get pregnant your doctor will take you off basically any and all medication you’re taking (including mental health medication, can’t imagine any implications/dire consequences there), not because they know it will have an adverse affect on the foetus but because they have no idea. How wonderfully kind of them to prioritise the health and life of an unborn foetus over that of a living person, let’s just hope they don’t become ill whilst pregnant. How charmingly logical it is that they wouldn’t even bother to test drugs in people with a uterus because it’s all too difficult and gosh, darn what an ethical conundrum we’ve been faced with, let’s just not! Which is so in the spirit of capital S, Science!  

Sources: Nature, Nature, Medscape, Biomedcentral.

Indeed, the issue is so severe that, in many cases, folks with uteruses are routinely told that their diseases and disorders are not, in fact, disorders at all, and are just a normal part of having a uterus.

Take menstrual cramps, for example. Everybody knows that cramps are a normal part of menstruation, and that virtually all people who menstruate experience them throughout their lives, right?

Except that’s not right at all.

Yes, it’s true that about two-thirds of individuals who menstruate begin to experience menstrual pain during adolescence, but it’s basically a side effect of puberty, and normally subsides by your late teens. Only about 20-40% of menstruating adults experience menstrual pain on a regular basis - and according to some estimates, as much as 80% of that figure is due to undiagnosed endometriosis or some other underlying medical condition.

Yeah, roll those numbers around in your head: if you’re an adult who experiences menstrual cramps, it’s overwhelmingly likely that your pain is a symptom of some potentially serious medical condition.

And yet we tell folks it’s just a normal thing that everybody has to deal with.

Bonus round: Look up PCOS and gender identity.

Then look up PCOS and diabetes.

Ok, to show how incredibly important this post fucking is, I just looked up endometriosis and I match just about every sympton, and it would explain not just my incredibly painful periods but many other things as well. I had no idea this existed.

Please, read this post and reblog this so others can learn.

I will reblog this every time because my cousin (a cis girl) went through seven years of pain without being taken seriously until SHE suggested it was endometriosis. And that’s not even unusual - that’s the average amount of time it takes between first symptoms and a diagnosis of endometriosis.

NO KNOWN CAUSES OR CURES. JUST SUFFER. - the doctors diagnosing me with pcos, Fibromyalgia, and endometriosis.

I was diagnosed with endo when was in my early twenties. Their advice to me was hurry up and make babies because you could be made infertile.

Go on birth control

Or have a hysterectomy

Something else to know is endo spreads. So you can get misdiagnosed for everything but endo because of the location of your pain.

My endo spread to my navel, gallbladder, rectum, ovaries, and vagina. The gallbladder pain caused my side to burn. Went to the er for it 4 years ago and they told me it was acid reflux

When my navel started bleeding when I was at work last fall er docs told me if was an infection.

In both cases I said I have endo but the endometriosis causing these symptoms was ignored until I went to a specialist.

The information about the clinical trials and drug development above is FALSE

1. The reason why they have limited data/knowledge about medication during pregnancy is because it’s fucking UNETHICAL to give a pregnant lady a drug that can potentially harm the baby. So they test it in pregnant animals which is really hard to extrapolate that data.

2. They do test medication in women. Almost every clinical trial I’ve evaluated in all 4 years of pharmacy school they’ve included both men and women. Who they don’t test are black people and other minorities.

3. There are a lot of medications with very well documented teratogenic effects. We have an entire category of them they are “pregnancy category X”

4. Physicians evaluate the benefit vs risk especially with antipsychotics and antidepressants ( which are pregnancy category C except Paxil ) most pregnant patients are actually left on there mental health medications because a sad mom leads to low birth weight.

Sources: 4 years of pharmacy school

The information isn’t false. Though gender balance in drug trial has improved since the 1990′s historically women were excluded from drug trials because they might become pregnant.  Feel free to read about the problem via this article in the Guardian about cardiovascular disease being the #1 killer of women, yet women are only in a third of all trial for those medicines. Also you can read the FDA’s resources on the topic & the NIH’s resources as well. Four years of pharm school might have shown you current approaches, but there are thousands of meds that were never tested on women before being released that have never been reassessed. 

(Source: trufemale420)

sapphicdalliances:

discovergames:

Seriously, though. I’d love to see these “you have no right to complain about what developers put in games” guys if in the next installment Master Chief was gay, the Call of Duty protagonist was Muslim, or Samus Aran was openly and vocally feminist. Do you really think their little Reddit dungeons would be awash with internally consistent statements like “well, it’s art, guys - we really don’t have the right to complain”? No. They would lose their fucking shit. They would send death threats and rape threats to every single developer and media outlet they can think of. They would protest, doxx, demean and attack anyone with a dissenting opinion. They would burn this whole medium to the fucking ground before letting something like that go unchallenged.

And yet they see no irony in portraying people who want better representation as the ones who are whiny, entitled, emotional and perennially catered to.  

#the ‘stop being offended’ crowd are the most easily offended group of people in existence (via boobacat)

I’ve come to notice that the only times men play games with female protagonists is when it’s easy to disguise or forget you’re playing as a girl. Take Portal, for example. Rarely do you see Chell, the woman you’re playing as. Many people who don’t pay as much attention don’t even realize she’s a girl for a while. Same goes for Metroid, especially the early games. If it can be forgotten or easily pushed aside that the protagonist is a girl, then men find it acceptable to play those games.

So of course then besides the lucky few, most games with a girl lead are aimed at only girls and poorly produced in order to suck up money by making it a girls game for younger girls rather than a legitimately fun and well made game. So that perpetuates that games that seem girly or feminine or have a female lead that isn’t made masculine or neutral are bad and poorly made, because most are.

Long story short, not only is much of the female representation in games abysmal (but that’s a whole different can of worms), but the non offensive representation they do have is masculinized so “boys can it play it too”, and all other representation that isn’t completely objectifying or masculinized is in poorly made cash sponges.

hitodeman:

I’m 100% with you if you want to joke about Justin Bieber’s arrest (or just him in general) because he’s an arrogant little shit, but if you have to resort to jokes where the punchline is “he looks like a girl” or “he could get raped in prison”, I want you to think real hard about what that says about your views on women and rape for a minute

(Source: hitodeman-blog-blog-blog)