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%)