We’ve been labelled ‘anti-sex difference’ for demanding greater scientific rigour | Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young

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Our criticism of gender research has been portrayed as dogmatic feminism – thankfully the scientific community has looked beyond the headlines

At a time when both science and feminism are under attack, there are welcome signs that neuroscience is showing new openness to critiques of research into sex differences. Mainstream journals increasingly publish studies that reveal how misleading assumptions about the sexes bias the framing of hypotheses, research design and interpretation of findings – and these critiques increasingly come with constructive recommendations, discussions and debates.

For example, we, together with other colleagues, made recommendations in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience on best practice in sex/gender neuroscience. Some of the errors and traps we identified included human neuroimaging studies with small sample sizes, and the common “snapshot” approach, which interprets neural associations with sex as a matter of timeless and universal male and female essences, without taking seriously the fact that biological associations might as easily be the effect of social differences as the cause of them.

These charges [against us] would only make sense in a world without shades of grey

Related: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus? New brain study says not

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We’ve been labelled ‘anti-sex difference’ for demanding greater scientific rigour | Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young

GP labelled hypochondriac criticises colleagues after dying from cancer

A GP who died from a rare form of kidney cancer has warned of the difficulties doctors face in getting treatment for themselves, in an emotional blog published posthumously.

Dr Lisa Steen described her anger at colleagues for failing to go the extra mile to help identify the disease and for dismissing her as a hypochondriac, in the essay published on BMJ.com.

The 43-year-old mother-of-two from Cambridge wrote of spending “two years wandering in the wilderness of the medically unexplained” before finally being diagnosed in July 2014, by which time the cancer had spread to her bones. She died in February.

She wrote: “I do not know how long I’ll live. It probably won’t be for many weeks. But right now I am glad to be alive. I am grateful for the expensive drug which is holding back the cancer.

“I am angry at being left in the medically unexplained wilderness and I did not like the way my colleagues looked at me, when they believed me to have health anxiety.”

Steen said hers was a cautionary tale for all health professionals who get ill, and for doctors treating other health professionals.

Affected by myriad symptoms, she eventually attended her GP in August 2012. Various tests failed to lead to a diagnosis and her condition was put down to health anxiety.

Steen, who was a GP for the drug and alcohol service Inclusion, wrote of her frustration at trying to describe her symptoms to doctors, and trying to diagnose herself.

She tried to explain that the symptoms might be connected to a benign carotid body tumour she had had when she was younger.

Her attempts to get investigatory tests and treatment were thwarted, she said, because of a “fear of looking even more ‘anxious’ or suffering from ‘health anxiety’, aka a hypochondriac”.

Eventually, embarrassed by being off work with no diagnosis, she returned to work. “I still knew there was something wrong, but it seemed fruitless going to see specialists. It was so humiliating, feeling like a goldfish with no voice. Watching doctors’ faces glaze over at the multitude of symptoms. Trying to fit it all in with work and looking after my family.”

After two years and prompted by weight loss, a routine ultrasound revealed a mass.

Steen wrote: “If any one of the doctors I saw had gone another mile, they would’ve stumbled upon it.”

But, she said: “they were reluctant to lay their hands on and examine a fellow medic”. And on her part, she said: “I was too embarrassed about my ‘psychiatric’ condition, too confused by not having the whole answer ready.”

She added: “My story is a cautionary tale to all of us health professionals when we get ill. Illness is somehow not the done thing. It upsets our ‘them/us’ belief system, which helps us cope with the horror of what we see.

“Mine is a cautionary tale to those treating health professionals, and those of us who are unwell – doctors do get ill, they don’t always know what is wrong with themselves. Give them a class A service because it is actually harder getting treated as a doctor than a layperson.”

Her husband, Raymond Brown, told the Telegraph: “They didn’t seem to be taking her too seriously, particularly because she had been diagnosed with health anxiety, she was being looked at as a hypochondriac.”

He added: “She just wants doctors to be aware when they are treating doctors to give them really good treatment and they have to be aware they are a patient and they don’t know everything. They need to be treated like a patient, not like a doctor.”

GP labelled hypochondriac criticises colleagues after dying from cancer

Hundreds of thousands unnecessarily labelled pre-diabetic, health authorities say

Pharmaceutical organizations are mentioned to be the only winners from classifying huge numbers of folks with pre-diabetes. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

Millions of individuals are getting unnecessarily labelled pre-diabetic, growing their likelihood of getting prescribed drugs which will at greatest briefly delay the onset of the sickness, say specialists.

Writing in the British Health-related Journal, scientists argue that the diagnosis is of tiny benefit and carries huge health care and social fees. What is needed is a public wellness method to tackle the issues in the food, overall health and educational surroundings which have led to widespread weight problems and inactivity – the major leads to of the rapidly escalating variety of cases of variety 2 diabetes.

The only winners from classifying vast numbers of people with pre-diabetes are the pharmaceutical firms, say the authors from University College London and the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, US. A latest study recommended that a third of the grownup population of the United kingdom has pre-diabetes and half the population of China – a vast marketplace for medicines.

Emeritus professor of medication at UCL, John Yudkin, said pre-diabetes “is an artificial class with almost zero clinical relevance .… There is no established advantage of offering diabetes therapy medication to folks in this class prior to they develop diabetes, particularly since numerous of them would not go on to create diabetes anyway.”

He says the numbers labelled as pre-diabetic have been considerably boosted by a new definition adopted by the Amertican Diabetes Association. Kind 2 diabetes can be confirmed by a blood check to measure average levels of haemoglobin A1c in the final three months. An A1c in excess of six.5% indicates kind two diabetes. The association now considers any person with an A1c of five.7% to 6.4% to have pre-diabetes.

The ADA guidelines had been those utilized by the current study published in BMJ Open, which was carried out by the University of Florida in collaboration with the University of Leicester in the Uk. There are 3.two million people in the Uk at present diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but sixteen million would be labelled pre-diabetic and potentially be given drugs beneath the ADA suggestions.

At the second, neither the World Well being Organisation nor the National Institute for Well being and Care Excellence (Wonderful) endorse the ADA suggestions. Great says we must “move away from describing pre-diabetes as a separate issue”.

Yudkin mentioned: “I am concerned about the increasing influence of the phrase. It has been utilized in several scientific papers across the planet, and has been applied to a third of grownups in the Uk and half of these in China. We require to stop searching at this as a clinical difficulty with pharmaceutical solutions and emphasis on improving public wellness. The complete population would benefit from a much more healthier diet and a lot more physical activity, so it can make no sense to single out so a lot of individuals and tell them that they have a disease.”

A distinct and a lot more complex test for variety 2 diabetes, measuring impaired glucose tolerance, can identify a significantly smaller set of individuals at substantial danger for sort 2 diabetes, and there is evidence that interventions this kind of as drug remedy may possibly help delay the onset for people. But the A1c test picks up a considerably greater cohort of about twelve million folks in the United kingdom who are at considerably reduce chance.

They and the whole population need help to tackle the underlying life-style leads to of type 2 diabetes, says the paper. “We require a shift in standpoint,” the authors write. “It is critically crucial to slow the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Rather than turning healthier individuals into sufferers with pre-diabetes, we ought to use available assets to adjust the food, education, overall health and financial policies that have driven this epidemic.”

Hundreds of thousands unnecessarily labelled pre-diabetic, health authorities say

Anti-abortion clinics must be plainly labelled as this kind of – or shut down | Kate Smurthwaite

A pro-choice campaigner in Northern Ireland. Unsafe practices must be ended ‘by legalising abortion in Northern Ireland and around the world’. Photograph: Reuters

The battle for a woman’s correct to decide on when it comes to abortion is normally framed in terms of geographical boundaries, time limits and clinic regulation. For a woman going through that knot of panic from a missed period or devastating news – sickness, task reduction, relationship breakdown – throughout a planned pregnancy, these things are essential. But to have genuine handle in excess of what is happening to her, she also demands clear and accurate information about her options.

So it was particularly terrifying to read in the Day-to-day Telegraph this week that “crisis pregnancy centres” are alleged to be routinely lying and scaremongering to suit their own religiously driven anti-choice agenda.

At the very same time, a report launched right now by the sexual well being organisation Brook alleges that these organisations are misleading ladies up and down the nation, which includes in schools and prisons.

These organisations have beneficial and official-sounding names such as the Central London Women’s Centre and CareConfidential. The latter is even linked to on the NHS’s official site webpage on abortion. At 1st glance they seem like any other medical centre.

The details they offer, however, isn’t going to meet the specifications we count on from NHS-accredited health care tips providers. Numerous are telling ladies there is a link between abortion and infertility. The Royal School of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says there is no proof of such a website link for legal abortion. The risks are true but only for ladies who have illegal, “backstreet” abortions. The conclusion we need to draw is the urgent need to have to end these unsafe practices by legalising abortion in Northern Ireland and about the world.

They also report a website link – refuted by the RCOG, Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Cancer Analysis Uk – amongst abortion and breast cancer. Nearly a third of the centres investigated by Brook had been authoritatively talking about “submit-abortion syndrome”, a disorder not recognised by any medical physique. In reality, the most typical response to abortion is, unsurprisingly, relief.

Most bizarrely of all, the Telegraph reported that two counsellors visited by its reporters have been generating the entirely unfounded and sickening claim that possessing an abortion could turn a lady into a little one sex abuser.

What all this cynical scaremongering fails to take into account is that abortion is not something that women select because it matches their handbag.

Women do not pay a visit to these centres prior to determining to have unsafe intercourse. Condoms never check out these centres prior to they choose whether or not or not to split. Antibiotics will not wander in asking if they ought to interact with the contraceptive pill. Rapists are not queued up outdoors flicking via sexual overall health literature.

These females are already experiencing crisis pregnancy. The alternative to abortion is carrying the pregnancy to term and delivering it. And that does have direct back links to bodily and mental well being hazards such as infections, bodily harm and postnatal depression. There’s also the threat of being a parent when you will not want to be and there’s no acquiring round the fact that that can make a full mess of your total life.

Individuals clinics deliberately passing off lies and horror stories as medical reality want to be closed down. People that continue to be need clear signage on their doors, internet sites and literature stating that they are anti-abortion organisations and that their suggestions should be taken, if at all, with that in thoughts. The NHS demands to preserve its distance and make certain females are not getting referred to these centres.

And 1 far more point. We require to do far better with intercourse schooling. We need to have a key overhaul of the existing decade-outdated set-up to generate something comprehensive, truth-based mostly and compulsory that reaches youthful females, and men, ahead of this type of crisis ever does.

Anti-abortion clinics must be plainly labelled as this kind of – or shut down | Kate Smurthwaite