This YouTube excerpt (uploaded by Kelly Alhooie) records clinicians and trainees describing how, during medical training, women with diffuse, unexplained symptoms were frequently dismissed as "whiny" or "somaticizing" rather than evaluated for hormonal causes (e.g., perimenopause/menopause). The speakers report this labeling was taught as institutional lore (terms like “whiny woman,” “whiny white woman,” regional variants) and reflect on consequences of attributing symptoms to personality or psychology.
Chapters
I was really disgusted to hear that at medical school, you were taught to be wary of wws.
So, yeah, that was in residency.
So we would do a couple of.
Days in the OR and like, three days in clinic. So my first clinic day long, white.
Coat, so proud of it.
It's brand new. I grabbed my chart, and I open it up, and it's a woman. And it's her, like, third or fourth doctor visit for these laundry list of problems. She. She was in her 40s.
Her periods were a little bit irregular.
She wasn't sleeping. She gained some weight. She was having headaches. She had no libido. She had some aches and pains. She had some dizziness. And I thought, you know, she'd seen family medicine.
She had palpitations, she'd seen cardiology.
You know, and finally, you know, they kept. She's going through the referral system. Well, we don't know what's wrong with you. Go to obgyn. Maybe it's something to do with that. And so I go to my upper.
Level, who's in charge of me that.
Day, and I say, here's Ms. Smith, and I present the case.
And he goes, did you check her thyroid?
I said, family medicine did. I went through the lab. She had some routine labs done.
Everything was normal.
Physical exam was pretty much normal. And he said, you got a ww? And I blinked and said, okay, what's that?
And he said, don't write this in the chart. But that's a.
That's a whiny woman. And she was Caucasian, so it was actually a www. A whiny white woman. And I internalized that story for the.
Rest of my training.
And I've talked to other clinicians across the US and there are other names in other parts of the country. It's whiny. Whiny Gyne's in California. Madame Dolores, like, up in this area. Tbd. Total Body Dolores in Miami. And then status Hispanic is why everyone is so down on the litig Latinas.
I have no idea.
But, you know, it just. There is this systematic lore now. This guy wasn't evil. He had been taught this, but there was just something about a woman in her 30s, 40s, maybe early 50s that.
You couldn't put your finger on.
The labs looked okay. She just kind of was complaining a.
Lot about multiple different things.
And we were never taught that hormones.
Might be involved in this. And that story bubbled up when I was writing and researching for the new menopause. And I just stop me in my tracks. I'm like that happened.
And that was institutionalized. That was taught that. I was taught that women tend to.
Somaticize psychological problems and if you can't figure out what it is, it's all in her head.
