Women are being "gaslit" by a medical community that is "failing them" due to outdated attitudes and ideas.

Dr Marieke Bigg, Author of ‘This Won’t Hurt: How Medicine Fails Women’ is warning that women’s pain is routinely disregarded by the medical community,

On Newstalk Breakfast, Dr Bigg said medicine is "failing women in many ways".

"Gaslighting has come to light over recent years as a word women are using to talk about a kind of communicative disenfranchisement," she said. “So women are not being heard in a medical context

"That means that their problems are often dismissed, especially in the area of gynaecology.

"A lot of reports have come to light about endometriosis; about the eight years it routinely takes, on average, to have that diagnosis."

Pain

Dr Bigg said women are often not heard unless their conditions are considered fatal, leaving them living with chronic pain for many years.

"That leads to proliferating issues," she said.

"It's also failing women because of a narrow focus on reproduction and childbirth when it comes to women's health.

"Women's health is about so much more than that."

Research

Dr Bigg said the "onus of responsibility" should not just fall on women to advocate for themselves.

"That means that research needs to be done into the areas that really matter to women's health," she said.

"Something like 2% of publicly funded research goes into reproduction and gynaecology – that needs to change."

Gender dynamics

Dr Bigg said there needs to be a revision of how medical professionals are trained.

"[To make] them attune gender dynamics in medicine and how to listen to women and how to make them feel heard and take their problems seriously," she said.

"I think doctors routinely overestimate how far we've come and that's because the default in medicine is still male. If you open any medical textbook, any picture of anatomy, the default, the standard, is still male.

"When there's this idea that medicine is gender neutral, but it's actually mainly applicable for men, that leads doctors astray."

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