The study later got retracted due to backlash but the fact that it happened at all if fucking baffling.
Donāt 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) womensā 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 āendometriosis.ā 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, idkā¦ 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 personās support network. Doesnāt 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 have no issues with doing research studies about the mental health of people in close proximity of pain.
My issue with it is mostly due to the lack of research on the people actually in pain. That study is good but it feels backhanded when the women with endo themselves are being left out of a lot of that study funding.
My issue with it is mostly due to the lack of research
Did you stop reading that comment halfway through?
There are over 55,000 hits on NLM for āendometriosis.ā The vast majority of them appear, from a quick perusal, to concern things one would expect, such as treatment, management, risk, and root cause
This IS being researched. What are you complaining about? That not 100% of the money goes directly into figuring out root causes and cures but instead some of it also goes into researching social, cultural, and genetic predispositions towards itās persistence?
Iāve watched my best friend with this go from getting told āWe canāt do a hysterectomy, you might want to have kids!ā (despite protests to the contrary) to āwell, we canāt be sure you have it without invasive surgeryā to āyouāre almost menopause age, itāll go away thenā.
Iām furious for her, itās been tough to watch at times.
I can add one to thatā¦ 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 couldnāt 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.
Theyāve refused to do a full hysterectomy, because ābut you might want to do in vitro laterā¦ā
Im confused. Can you not just tell them to do it anyways? How can they refuse?
I donāt know how you get them to do what youāre 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.
āHow do we find a doctor who will cooperate?ā 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 wasnāt 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. Itās part of the reason I hate doctors.
Hating doctors for the state of healthcare is like hating fast food workers for the state of the fast food industry. Very few of them are actual owners and every franchise is a front for some rent extraction by an inheritor leech. Any remaining quality just means the owner class didnāt extract enough value from it.
Your comparison is stupid. Fast food workers have almost no power over the people they serve. Doctors have an immense amount of power to fuck up your life especially if youāre legally required to do what they say. Not an insignificant number will do so if you hurt their feelings. All you need to do is read some of the comments on this post to be informed of that. Itās a problem with the system and a number of individuals with power in the system. I hate doctors because I can never know beforehand if one that Iām seeing is such an individual.
Curious is this was in progressive state or not. Or was it another country altogether.
Iām guessing these are USian posters, but youād perhaps be surprised at the shit that EU doctors spout, too. One does not simply āget healthcareā, especially as a woman.
Youāre watching Healthcare for Women, after the break, a special feature on āyour chronic pain and fatigue isnāt realā.
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 theyāre 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 ācoitarcheā.
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 theyāre flush with estrogen, and tend to have sparse pubic, leg, and arm hair. No uterus either which may be a pro for some guys.
And Iām still denied my requests to ājust rip out my uterus Iām not using it dear lord pleaseā despite being with the same guy for 20 years. Hhhh
Because one day youāll realize that bearing children is your only real purpose and then youāll be thankful to all those men who knew better than you!
/sItās not always male gynos. Itās 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.
Iām sorry Iām advance! It sucks! I hope your partner finds a good one! Iām limited by my insurance so maybe theyāll have more luck!
Iāve got a friend with Endo and this is the exact same thing the doctors told her. Same sitch as well - She or her Partner donāt want kids.
āWell, you might change your mind one dayā is the kinda responses she always used to get
Maybe after my 20th wedding anniversary theyāll consider it. Briefly. Before changing to ābut youāre so close to menopause now, just wait!ā
Rrrrraaaage
Being with the same guy for a while would probably not have an impact on fertility, to be fair. Just plain weird that they would mention that as a factor.
Because itās often mentioned Iāll find someone who will want them
But Iāve been with the same guy who also doesnāt so just take out the uterus eeeee
Sometimes itās āwhat if you find a new guy who wants themā which is insulting. Like Iād dump this one or something
My wife was trying to get her tubes tied for years. The doctors said the same thing. It went from āwhat about your husband? What if you changed your mind in the future? What if you meet someone else and he was the man of your dreams and wanted kids? Does your husband abuse you?ā
That last one was thrown in because apparently partners in abusive relationships donāt necessarily want to have kids with their abuser.
Different doctors all asking about the same questions untill she was able to find a doctor that gave her a tubal. So yay for that.
what if you find a new guy who wants them
Ah yes, you donāt have a say in whether you want children.
If a guy wants kids then heās not the guy for me! But no, clearly Iāll change everything to get a guy!
Yes
I considered posting this to !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world instead but im far more than mildly pissed about this whole thing.
We need a community like hotlyinfuriating, fuckinginfuriating or just infuriating.
Youād be surprised what the male dominated āacademic sphereā will fund and research.
I am most certainly not surprised.
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
Misogyny is still alive and well in spite of the times.
*especially because of the times
sadly
Conclusions of the study:
āWomen 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.ā.
Coitarche was a new word for me.
It leaves room for terms like coitarche nemesis
āI 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 āattractivenessā?ā
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.I have no love for the attractiveness crew of āresearchersā, it is in my eyes lazy work that is actionably useless.
But I do want to stunt on that paper; kings couldnāt 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 didnāt 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 isnāt devoid of value to humanity.
2013 being blissfully free of GenAI, not covering the fecklessā work ethic.
Genuinely donāt 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 donāt 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 Womenās 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 Iām studying.
Still, I donāt see the issue with funding such studies. It doesnāt take away any resources whatsoever from researchers attempting to find cures/causes. (Partially because academia is so underfunded, youād 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 shouldnāt 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. Itās a completely inconsequential metric thatās 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. āSevere mental illnessā is incredibly vague. Letās 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 āmost painful mental illnessā, and one of the hardest to treat, between 50-70% of those with BPD achieve long-term remission from treatment. Given that itās a personality disorder, the definition of ācuredā 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 thereās 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 weāre 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.
Fair points, though I will say chronic illness is usually classified by being resistant to treatment. Cancer (generally) isnāt chronic because either it kills you or you kill it. HIV is chronic because you cannot get rid of it (except for a handful of cases which underwent a risky bone marrow transplant but thatās ācheatingā ā itās like ātreatingā chronic knee inflammation with an amputation).
One of the studies with chronic illness in the title I now read the abstract from mentioned Alzheimer and Parkinson so I doubt they referred to curable diseases currently.
Also, I wouldnāt be so quick to judge research as ableist if the results are ableist. Provided the studies are neutral, wouldnāt it generally be beneficial to know how much people suffering from certain illnesses are affected by ableism? (Also the study found people suffering from endometriosis were more attractive, which could at worst be mysoginist instead of ableist I believe).
As to your last point, I agree - to limited extent. My main gripe is: Who gets to determine what research is wasteful? Should someone studying a super niche math topic with no real world use case (like ultrafinitism) not get funding? And how do you determine whether something is worth exploring (or not) if you donāt yet know the results? Hell, even showing there is no correlation between two things can be useful data because it allows researchers to rule stuff out.
The fact that the premise was proposed at all makes me think someone noticed a correlation and wanted to assess whether there was causation. As proving that could ultimately help with fixing the problem.
Maybe they discover that the āattractiveā group largely consisted of subjects with any of traits A, B or C, and what do you know, thereās a very high correlation between trait A and endometriosis.
Maybe some years later itās discovered that trait A and endometriosis have a common cause, some specific gene perhaps. That would be key for fixing the problem.
Iāll save you the click as someone with many medical issues myself. The answer requires only surface level thinking: if Iām too depressed, sick, or otherwise impaired, I will have less energy to take care of myself. Pretty easy to conclude that. You know where that money could be better spent? Helping solve the problems causing the issue. The reason these studies exist is to justify ableism. The people conducting and funding this research want an excuse to validate their belief that people with disabilities are unattractive. The real-world value of this research doesnāt extend beyond that ableist justification.
You quoted a bunch of studies about mental health/addiction and attractiveness. Itās should be self-evident why those two things are related.
You didnāt address the topic and quote any studies about physical health and attractiveness. Furthermore, you didnāt quote any studies about female sexual health and attractiveness. Furthermore, you didnāt quote any sources about Caucasian female sexual health and attractiveness. Most importantly you didnāt give us a reason why this particular study needed to happen more than a different junk science study with dubious motivations.
I picked the first results with meaningful amounts of citations. Not an ideal metric but at least correlated with relevance.
It should be self-evident why those two things are related
But thatās the entire point? Correlations that seem obvious MUST be proven by data. Also, why isnāt it obvious that endometriosis may affect attractiveness? From the retracted study itself:
Multiple studies have contributed a general phenotype associated with the disease (3ā12). 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, 11ā13), have an impact on perception of beauty (14, 15).
I havenāt actually read any citations or further. Still, this reasoning seems plausible to me. If endometriosis does actually correlate with a certain phenotype - which I donāt know is true or not, as again I havenāt read the citations - then this relation becomes self-evident just as much as the studies I quoted.
Also, I donāt see why quoted studies must be about the same exact topic. āCaucasianā [why does English even use this outdated term still] female sexual health and its relation to attractiveness sounds like one of these hyperspecific topics where finding relevant studies requires knowledge about which keywords to look for. Knowledge I donāt have.
And I have no clue about what other ājunk scienceā there is in human health research. How would I even be able to point to any other topic there? Besides I am unable to determine whether any study in a field I have zero experience in is junk or not. From Wikipedia:
Junk science has been defined as:
- āscience done to establish a preconceived notionānot to test the notion, which is what proper science tries to do, but to establish it regardless of whether or not it would hold up to real testing.ā[5]
- āopinion posing as empirical evidence, or through evidence of questionable warrant, based on inadequate scientific methodology.ā[6]
- āmethodologically sloppy research conducted to advance some extrascientific agenda or to prevail in litigation.ā[4]
If you have experience in that general field and can point out why it is junk, please do so.
You picked a bunch of studies where the correlation is obvious.
You have still given no reason why there was a correlation in this study: For example, give me a reason I shouldnāt believe this study wasnāt just a few horny āresearchersā trying to get laid. If you read the abstract of the studyā¦they donāt even propose a correlation, or the corresponding reasoning for doing the study in the first place.
You did, however, bloviate and muddy the waters a lot.
correlation is obvious
If a correlation isnāt immediately obvious, should it not be studied?
The abstract - if it can be even called that, seems more like a technical summsry to me - is useless btw, my quote is from the introduction. Itās more readable and goes a bit into the motivation of the research, which is roughly (if the citations are in order):
Women with endometriosis tend to have a certain phentoype. This phenotype shares traits that correlate with attractiveness. The research question follows: Are women with endometriosis more attractive than those without?
And the researchers were split evenly into men and women (assuming their gender from their names). Perhaps the three women happen to be bisexual or lesbian but Iād argue the chances of them trying to get laid areā¦ very low at best. Do researchers even get laid from doing any studies? I couldnāt think of anything less attractive than analyzing someoneās attractiveness on paper.
You didnāt make an argument. You just basically said āwe canāt find out if theyāre related unless we study themā.
I asked you to tell me why the study was done in the first place: what do we learn from the potential result? What potential scientific value did it serve? I didnāt ask you to filibuster me.
My hypothesis that the study was done to bring the researchers closer to attractive women is just as valid as any defence of the study.
Yes, but, clout and engagement >>>> rational thought.
I know exactly one person with endo
Sheās pretty hot
Even does modelling
Lmao the Italians definitely not beating the allegations with this study
