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The study later got retracted due to backlash but the fact that it happened at all if fucking baffling.
Don't forget this study that instead of studying the causes or cures for endo studied the mental effects of the men in a relationship with someone who has endo.
The one about attractiveness is on its face bizarre and gross. There are real problems with the way our society prioritizes (or should I say deprioritizes) womens' health. But IMO the framing in the linked image is dishonest. It makes it sound like the scientific community finally decided to get around to endometriosis in 2013, and chose to ignore causes and treatments. There are over 55,000 hits on NLM for "endometriosis." The vast majority of them appear, from a quick perusal, to concern things one would expect, such as treatment, management, risk, and root cause.
And the second study, the one about the effects on male partners? That one seems, idk... fine? Good, even. Endometriosis is incredibly painful, and seeing the person you love in pain can cause distress as well. Partners are usually the closest member of a person's support network. Doesn't it sound like maybe there should be some literature on the impacts on partners of people with endometriosis? Like maybe that could be useful? And idk how much this matters but five out of the six credited authors on that paper are women, and presumably they thought this was a worthwhile avenue of research.
I've watched my best friend with this go from getting told "We can't do a hysterectomy, you might want to have kids!" (despite protests to the contrary) to "well, we can't be sure you have it without invasive surgery" to "you're almost menopause age, it'll go away then".
I'm furious for her, it's been tough to watch at times.
I can add one to that… My partner has it. Like 100% without a doubt has it. Surgically confirmed, when she had her tubes removed. They said there was so much endo that they couldn’t even remove all of it without a blood transfusion. Again, she cannot get pregnant without donated eggs and in vitro fertilization, because she has no fallopian tubes at all.
They’ve refused to do a full hysterectomy, because “but you might want to do in vitro later…”
Im confused. Can you not just tell them to do it anyways? How can they refuse?
I don't know how you get them to do what you're asking but they can refuse by simply saying no. And if you are insufficiently servile in accepting that they will find ways of punishing you.
"How do we find a doctor who will cooperate?" is a great way to find out what kind of secret things doctors and hospitals can do to fuck up your life for threatening to go around them or hurting their feelings.
Reading all the comments in this whole goddamn post infuriates me to no end. I have an elderly friend with bipolar who got chewed up and spit out by the legal/medical system because she wasn't the most cooperative and they basically did things like put her on a heavy dose of haldol which turned her into a zombie to make her more cooperative and fuck with her heart meds almost like they were trying to give her heart attack. It's part of the reason I hate doctors.
I'm guessing these are USian posters, but you'd perhaps be surprised at the shit that EU doctors spout, too. One does not simply 'get healthcare', especially as a woman.
You're watching Healthcare for Women, after the break, a special feature on "your chronic pain and fatigue isn't real".
And I'm still denied my requests to "just rip out my uterus I'm not using it dear lord please" despite being with the same guy for 20 years. Hhhh
Because one day you'll realize that bearing children is your only real purpose and then you'll be thankful to all those men who knew better than you!
/s
It's not always male gynos. It's often female ones as well :<
That makes me really, really sad. My partner presents with symptomology consistent with endometriosis and wants to get it investigated but has had shitty luck with male doctors so is now specifically seeking a female doctor, and the thought that she might have to deal with the same condescending and paternalistic shit makes me quite angry.
I'm sorry I'm advance! It sucks! I hope your partner finds a good one! I'm limited by my insurance so maybe they'll have more luck!
I've got a friend with Endo and this is the exact same thing the doctors told her. Same sitch as well - She or her Partner don't want kids.
"Well, you might change your mind one day" is the kinda responses she always used to get
Maybe after my 20th wedding anniversary they'll consider it. Briefly. Before changing to "but you're so close to menopause now, just wait!"
Rrrrraaaage
Conclusion(s): Women with rectovaginal endometriosis were judged to be more attractive than those in the two control groups. Moreover, they had a leaner silhouette, larger breasts, and an earlier coitarche.
Okay but like, this actually does point at a potential cause (as in, why it persists/is so common in the population) of the condition, which is sexual selection.
Came to the comments looking for the missing context.
I sometimes feel their is a coordinated push to get women to percieve medicine as anti-woman, presumably so they are less trusting in modern science so they're more likely to buy into alternative medicines.
An earlier what?
Edit:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coitarche
If somebody has sex for the first time at 17 years old, and another person has sex for the first time at 20 years old, the person who had it at 17 had(has?) an earlier "coitarche".
I get the reasoning but is there even that much of a correlation between physical attractiveness and likeliness to reproduce?
Yep - I learned this from House:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome (CAIS)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3425689/
These are genetically male individuals (XY) who have internal un-descended testicles and present completely as a female phenotype because their body is incapable of reacting to testosterone.
Not only that, but they usually present as quite attractive women since they're flush with estrogen, and tend to have sparse pubic, leg, and arm hair. No uterus either which may be a pro for some guys.
I considered posting this to !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world instead but im far more than mildly pissed about this whole thing.
You'd be surprised what the male dominated "academic sphere" will fund and research.
Conclusions of the study:
“Women with rectovaginal endometriosis were judged to be more attractive than those in the two control groups. Moreover, they had a leaner silhouette, larger breasts, and an earlier coitarche.”.
Coitarche was a new word for me.
It leaves room for terms like coitarche nemesis
“I applied for this grant as a joke, but they actually accepted it. Now I have to work with these creeps. How the fuck do I scientifically evaluate ‘attractiveness’?”
Fun times that my friend had it so bad she was in bed for a couple of days in pain with her periods and this is what we get instead of studying a cure.
Fucking assholes
I knew as a teenager that periods are worse for some women than for others, but only about a year ago, I got to know a woman - with endometriosis - who regularly passes out from the pain, even after taking pain meds. I feel just so, so sorry for her.
If I were head of the WHO, I would make eradicating this dreadful disease a priority on day 1.
Genuinely don't see the issue with either.
Attractiveness of people suffering from illnesses is not a rare study really.
Quick Google Scholar search revealed for example these three:
Physical attractiveness and mental illness
Physical Attractiveness and Maladjustment Among Psychiatric Inpatients
I don't see any sociologists ever working on finding a cure or a cause of illnesses.
Similarly, the mental health effects of illnesses on their partner is also not a rare study:
Quality of Life: Impact of Chronic Illness on the Partner
The Impact of Partner Alcohol Problems on Women's Physical and Mental Health
My Illness or Our Illness? Attending to the Relationship When One Partner Is Ill.
I have not read any of these studies btw because neither sociology or medicine is a field I'm studying.
Still, I don't see the issue with funding such studies. It doesn't take away any resources whatsoever from researchers attempting to find cures/causes. (Partially because academia is so underfunded, you'd be hard pressed trying to find something to even take away)
The issue is perhaps we should send most of the funding to FIGURING OUT HOW TO FIX THE PROBLEM FIRST.
So all these studies mentioned above shouldn't have been made? Chronic illness, severe mental illness and alcoholism are all very difficult (if at all possible) to treat. Many treatments are just symptome reduction - important, yes, but far from a cure.
Also, if I had to guess, most money does go towards finding treatments. Studies investigating effects are - I believe - many orders of magnitude cheaper. They can be as simple as a survey with 100 or so participants. Now compare this with the cost of a clinical trial for some treatments.
There is no need to study the attractiveness of someone in relation to an illness they are suffering. It's a completely inconsequential metric that's ableist by design. Additionally, all 3 things you listed can have cures. Starting with the most obvious, many alcoholics are able to reach long-term sobriety, though studying methods to achieve higher success rates is obviously of importance. "Severe mental illness" is incredibly vague. Let's take one example, one that is notoriously difficult to treat: Borderline Personality Disorder (which I even happen to have). You can cure personality disorders, just not with medication. It requires you to spend lots of time in extensive therapy to essentially rewire the way your brain works. A quick search tells me that despite being classically cited as the "most painful mental illness", and one of the hardest to treat, between 50-70% of those with BPD achieve long-term remission from treatment. Given that it's a personality disorder, the definition of "cured" is not exactly clear, but remission brings patients below the requisite number of symptoms in the DSM to constitute diagnosis. Chronic illness is also a vague category, but there's progress being made on cures for many chronic illnesses. For instance, recent developments in Chimeric Antigen Receptors and inverse vaccines bring potential cures to a wide array of autoimmune disorders. These are chronic illnesses that were once thought to be incurable, but we're here sitting on research showing that these cures can work. That is the research we need, not some ableist BS about how people with chronic illness may be less attractive to other people.
As for your assumption about how funding works, there is only a limited amount of funding that goes into scientific research. The less that is wasted, the more opportunity there is for funding going to research that makes a difference.
I have no love for the attractiveness crew of “researchers”, it is in my eyes lazy work that is actionably useless.
But I do want to stunt on that paper; kings couldn’t even shit out a conclusion? They just discuss then ditch? They end with a paragraph of gibberish then just roll references? These are true clowns
And no abstract, just a shittier intro with no substance? Prob no substance because this line of research is worthless, but still they didn’t even try to fluff it up.
Abs embarrassing to write that shit in 2013 and not have the wherewithal to pen an abstract, conclusion, competent intro, or a line of research that isn’t devoid of value to humanity.
I know exactly one person with endo
She's pretty hot
Even does modelling
Lmao the Italians definitely not beating the allegations with this study
Facts that make you want to slap fifty people at random
"I don't want to live on this planet anymore"
;(
While I don't approve of this.
I do want to know.
Are people with endometriosis hotter than those without?
From the studies abstract.
[...] Patient(s): Three hundred nulliparous women. Intervention(s): Assessment of attractiveness by four independent female and male observers. Main Outcome Measure(s): A graded attractiveness rating scale. Result(s): A total of 31 of 100 women in the rectovaginal endometriosis group (cases) were judged as attractive or very attractive, compared with 8 of 100 in the peritoneal and ovarian endometriosis group and 9 of 100 in the group of subjects without endometriosis. A higher proportion of cases first had intercourse before age 18 (53%, 39%, and 30%, respectively). The mean SD body mass index in women with rectovaginal endometriosis, in those with other disease forms, and in those without endometriosis was, respectively, 21.0 2.5, 21.3 3.3, and 22.1 3.6. The median (interquartile range) waist-to-hip ratio and breast-to-underbreast ratio were, respectively, 0.75 (0.71–0.81), 0.76 (0.71–0.81), and 0.78 (0.73–0.83), and 1.15 (1.12–1.20), 1.14 (1.10–1.17), and 1.15 (1.11–1.18). Conclusion(s): Women with rectovaginal endometriosis were judged to be more attractive than those in the two control groups. Moreover, they had a leaner silhouette, larger breasts, and an earlier coitarche. (Fertil Steril 2013;99:212–8. 2013 by American Society for Reproductive Medicine.)
This is so fucked up and absolutely hillarious at the same time, in an absurd, kafkaesque way.
What kind of sleepy misogynistic fuck proposes this idea, and how the fuck does it get approved?
And the introduction is rather short. I will post it Here as well.
The observation that subjects with specific phenotypic traits are prone to the development of particular organic or psychiatric disor- ders is an old medical tenet. Nowadays, these relationships tend to be explained based on genotype-phenotype associa- tions, which have been suggested for over one hundred disorders, including diabetes, obesity, Crohn's disease, and hypertension (1, 2). Along this line, some recent advances in endometriosis research fit this view, as multiple studies have contributed to the definition of a general phenotype associated with the disease (3–12). Intriguingly, such an emerging phenotype appears to be indirectly linked with attractiveness, because several of the physical characteristics studied, including body size, body mass index (BMI), and pigmentary traits (4, 5, 7, 8, 11–13), have an impact on perception of beauty (14, 15). A biological gradient between the degree of expression of these traits and the degree of severity of endometriosis has also emerged. As an example, with regard to body size and figure, an inverse relationship has been observed between BMI and severity of the disease in general (8), and in particular in patients with deep endometriosis (12). Despite this growing body of evidence, studies formally investigating attractiveness in women with endo- metriosis are lacking. To verify the potential relationship between endometriosis and attrac- tiveness, and to substantiate a pos- sible biological gradient between aggressiveness of the disease and de- gree of attractiveness, we designed a case-control study recruiting three groups of subjects, that are, women with deep rectovaginal forms, women with peri- toneal implants and/or ovarian cysts but without rectovaginal lesions, and women without endometriosis. The degree of physical attractiveness, the main study outcome, was assessed by independent female and male observers. Secondary out- comes were definition of selected morphological characteris- tics and sexual habits. Information on pain at intercourse and on sexual functioning in the three study groups is reported elsewhere.
I dont See how this study aides the body of research but I am also not in that field.
While infuriating, I love Lemmy and actually posting sources.
On topic, I don't know how to feel because I value academic freedom but at the same time I just ask Why? Didn't anyone think about it beforehand? Reading their apology was joyful. Can't imagine how they felt.
And why would they retract it too? Isn't only an apology correct for their purpose? Sigh.