written By Zita Osuji
edited by Nnenna Hemeson
Up until 1980—yes, less than fifty years ago—doctors had a formal diagnosis for women whose symptoms they couldn’t explain: hysteria. Derived from the Greek word for uterus, “hystera,” the diagnosis basically meant that if a woman was in pain and a male doctor couldn’t figure out why, she must be making it up. In today’s world, and while the term “hysteria” is gone, the mindset lingers. Women are still being told their pain is anxiety, their symptoms are standard, and their bodies are impossible to decipher.
The diagnosis may have been retired, but the underlying assumption that women are unreliable narrators of their own physical experience never really left. It just got dressed in a different language. Now we call it “catastrophizing.” We call it “somatization.” We call it “stress.” The words are more clinical, but the function is the same: when a woman’s body doesn’t conform to medical expectations, the problem is filed under “her” rather than “us.”
Take endometriosis. It affects roughly one in ten women, yet the average time to diagnosis is seven to ten years. Seven to ten years of patients being told their debilitating pain is “just bad periods.” Seven to ten years of missing school, missing work, missing life while the medical establishment shrugs and calls it complicated.
Or consider cardiovascular disease. It’s the leading cause of death for women in the United States, but women presenting with heart attack symptoms are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home from the emergency room. Why? Because the “classic” heart attack symptoms chest pain, arm numbness, shortness of breath were established by studying primarily male patients. Women often experience different symptoms: nausea, jaw pain, extreme fatigue. Symptoms that look, to a system trained on male bodies, like anxiety.
The thread connecting these statistics is thin but consistent: women’s pain is first presumed to be exaggeration before investigated.
This presumption doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s reinforced by research gaps that are only recently beginning to close. For decades, clinical trials largely excluded women of childbearing age under the logic that hormonal fluctuations would “complicate” the data. The result? Drugs on the market that were never properly tested on the bodies that would eventually take them. A 2020 study found that women are twice as likely as men to experience adverse drug reactions not because their bodies are defective, but because the dosage guidelines were built around male physiology.
The pattern is so consistent it becomes invisible: women are medical afterthoughts in a system designed by and for men, then blamed when their bodies don’t fit the mold.
The consequences are measurable. Black women in the United States are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, a disparity that persists even when controlling for income, education, and access to care. The cause isn’t genetics; it’s bias. Studies show that medical students and residents consistently underestimate Black patients’ pain, rating it lower than white patients’ pain and offering less aggressive treatment. If your pain isn’t believed, you don’t get help. If you don’t get help, you die.
This is the legacy of hysteria. Not a word, but a permission structure. A way of saying: we don’t have to listen to you.
And for generations, women have internalized it. We’ve learned to apologize for taking up space in exam rooms. To preface our symptoms with “I’m sorry, this is probably nothing, but,” To leave appointments with our concerns unresolved and a prescription for antidepressants we didn’t ask for.
The shift happening now, women sharing stories, demanding better research, refusing to accept “it’s nothing serious” as an answer, isn’t just about healthcare. It’s about reclaiming authority over our own bodies. It’s about saying: I know my body. I can tell when something is wrong.
The question is whether the system is ready to change.
