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[L]et's acknowledge that we are asking individual women to compensate for the medical system's failures. While some patients may want to be partners in their medical care, and the Internet has certainly made it easier for some patients to educate themselves, not all women have the vast resources required to become "empowered patients."

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (61%)

We should all be afraid of what the story of contested illnesses like ME/CFS, chronic Lyme, and chemical intolerance says about the medical system's ability or inability to recognize and respond to emerging diseases.

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (59%)

Back in the early eighties, when the NIH set aside a small chunk of funding for research on endometriosis, not a single researcher applied for the funds. "Most doctors assumed women's excruciating pelvic pain was all in their heads," Laurence and Weinhouse explained. "Why should physicians have devoted precious research time to studying a condition that didn't even exist?" Today, there's more interest, but funds remain scarce. In 2016, endometriosis received just 10$ million in NIH funding. That means that for each patient with endometriosis, the NIG spent about $1.50. "Endo is sorely underfunded," says Heather Guidone, surgical program directed at the Center for Endometriosis Care. The lack of attention to endometriosis in the research community and in medical education has left the field, as one researcher put it in 2004, in a state of "etiological confusion and therapeutic anarchy." Despite prevalence rates that make it one of the most common conditions gynecologists are likely to encounter, medical education about the disease remains inadequate. (..). And many doctors, Ballweg adds, "don't even want to deal with endometriosis, because it's really hard to get a happy patient, and they don't know what to do."

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (45%)

Milton Friedman's [13 September 1970] 3,000-word essay on the question of social responsibility in business set out the case so concisely and so attractively that it shaped the culture of management and business for decades to come. From then on, the question of the purpose of the corporation was more or less settled. Essays and panel sessions on 'ethical capitalism', 'corporate responsibility' and 'stakeholders' would continue among successful people with socialist or Christian parents. But although we tried to take the opposite case seriously, everybody really knew that corporations serve the purpose of shareholder value, and that was an end to it.

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 205)

One of Friedrich Hayek's contemporaries defined economics as the 'science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses'. It's this idea of a generalised study of human behaviour under conditions of scarcity that has been responsible for the economists' intellectual imperialism. Because if you announce that you're the experts on human beings when they have to choose between different priorities under conditions of scarce resources, when aren't resources scarce? When don't people have to choose between different things they want?

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 143)

To the extent that any of it was designed at all, this world was designed by economists. Of all the social sciences, economics was the one that embedded itself in the governance and regulation of public life — the higher functions of the system, the ones that balance future and present needs. (..). Adopting the economic mode of thinking reduces the cognitive demands placed on our ruling classes by telling them that there are lots of things they don't have to bother thinking about. The adoption of economic growth and efficiency as a core philosophy and cost-benefit analysis as a method of governance means not only that thousands of possible policies can be rejected without serious consideration, but also that whole approaches to human life never need to be considered.

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 141)

During the 2000s, for example, the world's central banks thought everything was fine — they made up nicknames for the period of stability that lasted from the late 1980s to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Alan Greenspan of the US Federal Reserve called it a 'Goldilocks Economy' — not too hot, not too cold. Mervyn King of the Bank of England called them the 'NICE times', an age of non-inflationary continuous expansion. Probably the most commonly used name was the 'Great Moderation'. All the while, a huge debt bubble was building up, with house prices spiralling out of control.

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 134)

Whether or not they're deliberately being misleading, more often than not, researchers still don't do a gender analysis. In the review of federally funded trials mentioned above, 75 percent of the studies did not report any outcomes by gender, and 64 percent did not provide any analysis by racial or ethnic groups. In 2010, a review of 150 recent studies of treatments for depression found that only half the studies analyzed the results by gender. Of over 700 ongoing studies, nearly 90 percent of researchers said they planned to include women, but less than 1 percent said they planned to analyze their results by gender. A 2011 review of 750 studies focused on emergency medicine between 2006 and 2009 found that while the majority reported gender as a variable, less than one-fifth examined health outcomes by gender. Advocates often describe what's happened as the "add women and stir" approach. There was a sense in the nineties that just getting women enrolled in studies would "take care of the problem," explains Dr. Jan Webinski, executive director of the Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative. "But it's been twenty-five years and we now have a lot of research that includes women but women are still invisible. Researchers [..]. weren't required to report their research by sex, so women's side effets and responses to medications and diseases were still invisible.

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (7%)

There is research to back up these anecdotes, though not as much as you might imagine, only because, I came to learn, there's little research on diagnostic errors in general, which are described by experts as an enormous blind spot within the profession. But where it exists, it paints a fairly consistent picture: women are often not taken as seriously as their male counterparts when they enter the medical system. Women wait sixty-five minutes to men's forty-nine before getting treatment for abdominal pain in the emergency room. Young women are seven times more likely to be sent home from the hospital in the middle of having a heart attack. Women face long delays, often years long, to get diagnosed even with diseases that are quite common in women. And they experience longer diagnostic delays in comparison to men for nearly everything, from brain tumors to rare genetic disorders.

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (1%)