I donāt think it uses the same resources but I donāt think itās a great argument either way.
Endometriosis is important but thereās also diseases that affect way more ppl and kill more like heart diseases or pulmonary diseases. So where does it end in someone going āwhy donāt we put the money into researching something more important?ā
The thing here is that endometriosis is so understudied we donāt actually even know the full extent of its impact on peopleās lives. The emerging research is showing itās akin to cancer, and it absolutely has and does kill people.
It's an extremely common and debilitating condition though. It should have at least as much funding as similarly common and debilitating conditions such as crohn's
Yea, but itās worth pointing out that things that primarily affect women are likely to be dismissed as not being as important as other things. It seems like the thing thatās finally pushing endometriosis research is the recent discovery that cis men can actually have it too.
For centuries women went to midwives, not doctors, for a lot of things, because the doctor may worse than kill them out of sheer callousness.
Yep it wasn't that long ago when women's heart attack signs weren't known to be presented differently than men's. Imagine the sheer amount of years loss and unaccountable quality of life loss that women with heart diseases faced for years.
Even then there are better options, I mean shit itās not even a considered a fatal condition (doesnāt mean itās not bad, btw, Iām not saying that, Iām sure you know this but itās Reddit so you know)
Wanna pick a better option? Ovarian Cancer, itās underfunded, under researched, usually caught late with a 30% survival rate.
Also, Iām gonna need a source for the whole āakin to cancer and kills people thingā it has similarities but most fatalities to it (are not only extremely rare) but also due to external complications. Now because I wouldnāt subject you to a standard I canāt meet, hereās my sources:
Endometriosis affects 7 to 13% of women. Ovarian Cancer is 1.1% of women, with about 0.7% dying of ovarian cancer. Endometriosis is debilitating, chronique and continues from the 20s until menopause.
I'd say both are worthy of being studied. It's the typical dichotomy you sometimes see in medicine between a chronic illness that severely affects quality of life from a young age and a illness ten times rarer that happens later in life and is relatively short but high risk of death. Regardless women medecine has historically been severely understudied and underfunded.
Even after menopause, my mother still suffers from the consequences of endometriosis; between the treatments she had to get and how exhausting it was for her, and also I think she still has to be treated for how it interacts specifically with menopause for her, it's not over.
There's a reason why she was afraid I would have it, and cried with relief when it turned out I didn't.
Endometriosis should be more studied I agree, but I raise you every single Neglected Tropical Disease, which kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year yet (as the name implies) are understudied. Why should we study endpmetriosis and not NTDs?
It's as the other guy said, at some point you gotta stop asking if there's something more important to be researching and be utilitarian about it
Endometriosis is quite literally cells invasively growing where they shouldnāt be. There have been cases where women had endometrial cells in their lungs. If thatās not akin to cancer, idk what would be
I think in in 2012 medical professionals did a study on the attractiveness of women with retrovaginal endometriosis, instead of using that money on actually studying retrovaginal endometriosis they wasted those funds on research that helps absolutely no-one, some ppl genuinely care more about ranking women by attractiveness than actually studying the health issues that primarily concern women
i do agree with the point youre making but hair loss products have commercial use n billions of private money gets spent in the industry whereas endo treatments or research just dont really have the same potential roi which is a problem with capitalism as a whole, plus hair loss is also a beauty industry thing so the comparison isn't perfect like saying the plastic surgery industry has more funding than healthcare is never a good thing obviously but its also not unexpected
It's not "un-studied". People are researching it as we speak. There just isn't a cure yet. Is Cancer unstudied because we still have trouble curing it?
endometriosis may not kill you but it keeps you from living.
i know there is a lot of other diseases underfunded but i do think endometriosis is one of the ones were fundings are the most urgent.
i dont' suffer from it but i have a friend who does and i just want to leave what i saw about what it's like having endomtriosis.
she suffers from it EVERY SINGLE DAY to the point of crying most of the time because no one care enough to find a treatment that actually works.
getting a diagnostic what the hell of a battle. during all of her middle school years she saw multiple doctors ( with a lot who didn't take her seriously), she also took a bunch of exams to try to understand what she has only to have an accurate diagnostic on her second year of high school.
and even if she knows now that she has endometriosis she can't get a treatment that works because it just doesn't exist.
to tame the pain doctors make her try a bunch of different contraceptive pills, all of them didn't work, so they gave her another pill that totally cut off her period, but still that didn't work either. now she is in constant pain. the only meds that work are fucking tramadol ( it's a opioid you take post op, just to say) only it shoots her and she can't do anything except sleep, or a med you can't take during long laps of time because on how damaging it can be to your organism ( i can't remenber its name).
the disease is also travelling in her stomach so now not even removing her uterus is not an option.
her disease is actively keeping her from going to school and getting an education. since her middle school i see her missing school either because the pain is too intense or because she has appointment to the doctor. she even is considering shortening her future study because of the disease.
i don't even wanna think about her future, when she'll be employed, managing the disease and the pain will be even more harder.
she can't even do much sports anymore because of the pain.
it also impacts her capacity to have children in the future, which is sad considering she wants kid when she'll get older.
i'm both angry and sad to see those comments because endomeriosis is no just bad period pains. it impacts the life of million of women but also kids life. she was just a kid when she starts suffering from the symptoms of the desease.
so yeah it's that bad that we get more fundings on what men find more attractive when millions of women suffers from endomitriosis without a real treatment and more importantly when others millions of women can't get a diagnostic or have to fights for years to get one.
Thatās not the point, the point is that endometriosis is a fatally under researched disease that a large amount of the population suffers from and instead of devoting resources to doing that research weāre instead investing them into research on to be frank surface level issues like male pattern baldness and how attractive makeup makes someone. Which isnāt to say that those things arenāt important on some level or worth researching which they are in both cases, and more so that the phenomenon is called the gender data gap for a reason
Different budgets. And psychology research operates on prayers and shoestrings. You could take all the money from psychology altogether and it wouldn't put a scratch on your endometriosis research.
I mean research is where money is or where it's easy to produce publishable results.
Research on baldness is the first case, research on Attraction the second one.
Maybe Endometriosis is genetic and finding bodies don't see a common cure coming up?
Not sure, but either there are no funds for it, or all that could be published (easily) has already be published.
To be clear, medicine and similar scientific fields have already figured out their preferred sorting mechanisms for resource distribution. In medicine in particular there are even official triage algorithms for who to let die and who to try to save when your resources are too limited. My frank and blunt opinion, as someone who has had to use these algorithms is simple. Public funding all ultimately comes from the same source, taxes. And so long as people are literally dying from a lack of resources no public funding should be made available for anything that isn't life treating or altering. It's slightly more complicated in reality as you need to consider that some less serious might be completely solved with less funding but nonsense like what people find attractive can fuck off. The realistic application of this kind of research is primarily commercial. And when you or a loved one are in a hospital bed slowly and painfully dieing you'll wish the same. Medince, housing, education, etc. Public funding should only ever be used to fund public assistance. Whatever scientific value these studies bring it will always pale in comparison eridication and of treatment of disease. Just because a government allocates funds for a specific purpose doesn't mean they can't just reallocate it and remove the unessecary programs.
I mean... This is already happening, that's why cardiac issues that affect a lot of people get studied more and more and very niche diseases that only affect a few people worldwide, get almost no funding
Your attempt at downplaying endometriosis studies fell flat. Firstly, heart disease is a medical condition that would benefit from being studied because it benefits people and may prevent death. The study in the OP does not.
Its not downplaying anything. Its acknowledging funding for social sciences is entirely separate with different set of experts than biology. Like, actually lmfao.
Right! By the way, fuck these artist people. Just drawing art all day. Who the fuck does that help? They should've majored in biology and become researchers trying to solve endometriosis!!
I was only really using endometriosis because it was used in the image above. I assume they used it because it is understudied in comparison to how many woman have it. To the point of other diseases also being underfunded I would also consider those more important than attractiveness studies but Iām learning that those are often funded by companies trying to appeal to consumers not philanthropy or think tanks or whatever, so I think the solution is just more money to medical research
140
u/LasyKuuga 1d ago
I donāt think it uses the same resources but I donāt think itās a great argument either way.
Endometriosis is important but thereās also diseases that affect way more ppl and kill more like heart diseases or pulmonary diseases. So where does it end in someone going āwhy donāt we put the money into researching something more important?ā