Each year, an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 people die due to diagnostic errors in the US alone. More than just a frustration for patients, these delays cause unnecessary deaths. So did nearly twice as many with renal cancer. A 2013 study concluded that more than twice as many women as men had to make more than three visits to a primary care doctor in the UK before getting referred to a specialist for suspected bladder cancer. It isn’t that women wait longer to seek medical attention – the delay occurs after they’ve first visited their GP. A 2015 study revealed a longer lag time from the onset of symptoms to diagnosis in female patients in six out of 11 types of cancer. One of the most pervasive implicit biases in the medical system regards gender.īrain tumours are only one example. “Their bias absolutely makes its way into the exam room.” “We want to think that physicians just view us as a patient, and they’ll treat everyone the same, but they don’t,” says Linda Blount, president of the Black Women’s Health Imperative. No one took me seriously.”Ī growing body of research is exploring how “implicit” bias – unconscious biases that are usually not linked to consciously held prejudiced attitudes – contributes to disparities in medical treatment. I went back repeated times to be given antidepressants, sleep charts, analgesia, etc. One 39-year-old woman quoted in the report recalled: “One of the GPs I saw actually made fun of me, saying ‘what did I think my headaches were, a brain tumour?’ I had to request a referral to neurology.

You might also like these other stories in the Health Gap : They were more likely than men to see 10 or more months pass between their first visit to a doctor and diagnosis –and to have made more than five visits to a doctor prior to diagnosis. Women, as well as low-income patients, experienced longer delays.

Nearly a quarter weren’t diagnosed for more than a year. It found that almost one in three of them had visited a doctor more than five times before receiving their diagnosis. Either the tumour is there, or it isn’t.īut in 2016, the Brain Tumour Charity released a report on the treatment of brain tumour patients in the United Kingdom. Promptly detecting it comes down to being concerned enough about the early symptoms – which range from fatigue to seizures to personality change – to get an image of the brain. Compared to many other diseases, diagnosing a brain tumour is fairly straightforward.

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