Last month, the Daily Mail reported on the shocking case of 15-year-old Olivia Maunder, who was told by Frimley Park Hospital to try a mindfulness app to deal with her âindescribable agonyâ. It turned out she had a tumour in her pelvis. On one of the many occasions she was taken to A&E, she was told to âcalm downâ. On another, she was told that she was just âmirroring [her] mumâs pain as she had had back problemsâ. She and her mum were told it was all down to stress. By the time the tumour was discovered, it was so extensive that surgery was no longer an option. Olivia now has a few months to live.
I had a personal experience of this some years ago, when a friend lost the use of her legs and was offered mindfulness classes rather than a mobility scooter. No doubt she was expected to use the power of her mind to teleport.
I wonder if men are told to go away and be mindful as much as women are? I very much doubt it. We didnât need the arrival of terms like âcervix-haversâ and âmenstruatorsâ â but never âprostate-haversâ and âejaculatorsâ â to know that the medical profession has always treated women differently. Women are 50 per cent less likely to be diagnosed after having a heart attack, are given less CPR than men, and are more likely to be given sedatives â rather than painkillers â for pain than men. While the NHS has been busy erasing such hate-speech terms as âmotherâ and âbreastfeedingâ from their public-information bulletins, NHS maternity negligence claims have doubled in the past decade. Last year, it was revealed that more than 200 babies and nine mothers had died due to bad care at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust alone.
Sadistic doctors no longer perform lobotomies on women as a cure for promiscuity, or diagnose any female behaviour unpleasing to men as âhysteriaâ, but as Caroline Criado-Perezâs 2019 book, Invisible Women, pointed out, the medical system is âfrom root to tip, systematically discriminating against women, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosedâ. Women are still being told that extreme illnesses are all in their minds. Nicolette Baker, a woman from Cornwall, shrunk to three stone because her doctors insisted that she was anorexic, repeatedly sectioning her. She is dying of Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome. Kirsty Maxwell, from Perthshire, was repeatedly told she had an eating disorder and was given everything from Gaviscon to antidepressants. She had terminal cancer. Doctors certainly seem to know what a woman is when it suits them â someone you tell to âcalm down, dearâ.
This is the most lethal kind of gaslighting. It needs to be tackled, not zhuzhed up with twaddle like mindfulness. Itâs thought to be worth around $4 billion, taking in everything from meditation apps to the 60,000 books on Amazon including the word âmindfulnessâ in their titles, including Mindful Finance, Mindful Leadership and Mindful Dog Owners. This is all despite the increasing evidence that too much navel-gazing can increase depression and decrease your ability to withstand pain â even though dealing with pain is precisely what mindfulness is often prescribed for.
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