Until just a few weeks ago, Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome was reduced to ovarian cysts, much to the frustration and confusion of many patients with this systemic endocrine condition. The struggles of people with endometriosis to access patient-centred and appropriate care continue in many countries.

These are examples of the despair many patients report when they try to access hormonal and reproductive healthcare, as described by the Australia Institute.

This is not simply a matter of a few bad clinicians. It is part of a long pattern in which medicine has repeatedly treated women’s testimony as unreliable, women’s pain as less urgent and women’s reproductive bodies as peculiarly available for unwarranted surgical intervention.

One of the clearest ways to describe the problem is as an injustice over whose knowledge counts. Women 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.

This problem has deep historical roots in the emergence of western biomedicine. For centuries, medicine in Europe treated women’s bodies as governed by reproductive organs that were understood to be volatile. In the 1700s, women were still thought to be ruled by nervous disorders such as “the vapours”. In the 1800s, they were defined as the “sicker sex”, their ageing reduced to menopause, and they........

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