Rachel Fassler was in so much pain that she couldn’t remain still long enough for the emergency room nurses to take her blood pressure. After hours of being overlooked, dismissed, and misdiagnosed (she was initially treated for kidney stones) by two male doctors, Fassler was finally treated appropriately by a third physician, a woman, and rushed into emergency surgery to have a swollen ovary removed.
The details of Fassler’s horrific experience in the hospital that day was told by her husband Joe Fassler in The Atlantic back in 2015. The piece “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously”opened the floodgates for women to share their stories of having their pain ignored sometimes for years by mostly by male doctors, though not exclusively. Rachel Fassler refers to this as “the trauma of not being seen.”
On a recent episode of Kindreds, a podcast I co-produce on faith and feminism, entitled “Women and Pain” my co-host Ashley Peterson and I spoke at length about the dynamics of Fassler’s experience–and the fact that it was her husband who told the story publicly. We wondered, would this piece in The Atlantic have gained as much traction had Rachel written about it herself? Why do women need male validation in order to be believed and taken seriously?