Women Know Their Bodies

Women Know Their Bodies

Women Know Their Bodies and should be listened to. A profound difficulty for women in clinical negligence cases, as in medicine as a whole, is that they are often wronged not only in what is done to their bodies but in their status as the knowers of those bodies.

Their bodily experience is doubted and psychologised, and their accounts of symptoms and mistreatment are dismissed. They are insufficiently informed because their consent is assumed from silence or trust.

Their symptoms are put down to hormones, nerves, emotions or reproductive organs. If they report pain they are told it can’t be. Simply that.

There is a common myth: that radical gynaecological surgery is an unavoidable answer to women’s suffering. For instance, women are steered too quickly towards hysterectomy for benign uterine tumours, when sterilisation clips migrate women are told it can’t cause pain, mesh injured women were told it was their body and not the device at fault.

Women are herded into procedures they do not fully understand, the defence of which is as abhorrent as the procedure itself.

If defendants and their legal advisers really truly listened, they would learn a great deal about patient safety and how to improve it, rather than continue to deny the existence of problems with present day medical procedures.

 

Call us today

If you’re ready to discuss your situation or have any questions please contact Dr Victoria Handley today. Don’t suffer in silence. Call FREE on 0800 470 2009 or email vhandley@handleylaw.co.uk