What Women's Equality Day Has to Do With Getting Taken Seriously by Your Doctor
"Your symptoms are data," Dr. Brooks tells her patients. "If a lab value comes back in the 'normal' reference range but you still feel unwell, that is not the end of the investigation. That's the beginning of a better question."
Last updated: August, 2026
Women's Equality Day falls on August 26, marking the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. It's a day usually associated with voting rights and workplace policy. But every August, I find myself thinking about a quieter, less visible form of equality: the one that happens in an exam room, when a patient describes what's happening in her body and waits to see whether the person across from her actually believes her.
I've built my practice around that exact moment. This post is for the woman who has left an appointment more confused than when she walked in, the one who has been told her labs are "normal" while she still feels wrong, and the one who is starting to wonder if the problem is her for not accepting the answers she's been given. It isn't. I want to explain why this happens, what the research actually shows about it, and what a different kind of care relationship looks like.
Why This Connects to Women's Equality Day
I want to be direct about something before I go further: this isn't a political post, and it isn't about any policy debate. Women's Equality Day is simply the calendar marker that gives us permission, once a year, to talk openly about a gap that exists year-round. Equal access to a fair hearing from your own physician is a health equity issue, not a partisan one. It shows up in wait times, in whose symptoms get worked up and whose get reassurance and a follow-up in six months, and in whose pain gets treated as data and whose gets treated as personality.
Patients don't need me to tell them this happens. Most of the women I see already know it, because they've lived it. What I can offer is language for what they experienced, evidence that it's real and measurable, and a clinical relationship where it stops.
What "Being Dismissed" Actually Looks Like in a Clinical Setting
Dismissal rarely looks dramatic. It's usually small and procedural, which is part of what makes it so disorienting. In my experience, it tends to show up as one of the following patterns:
Fatigue, brain fog, or mood changes attributed to stress or "just getting older" without any metabolic or hormonal workup
Normal lab results presented as the end of the conversation instead of the start of one
Chest pain, palpitations, or shortness of breath treated as anxiety before cardiac causes are ruled out
Weight gain addressed with a generic diet and exercise recommendation, with no evaluation of what's actually driving it
A cluster of joint pain, rashes, or digestive symptoms met with reassurance rather than referral, sometimes for years before a diagnosis is reached
None of these are hypothetical. They are documented patterns in the medical literature, and I want to walk through what that research actually shows, because the data is more concrete than most people expect.
What the Research Says
I'm going to cite real studies here, not anecdotes, because this is exactly the kind of claim that should never rest on a feeling.
A study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that women visiting emergency departments with chest pain waited noticeably longer than men, roughly 29 percent longer, before being evaluated for a possible heart attack, according to reporting from the Washington Post.
Separate research covered by WomenHeart found that women under 55 were seven times more likely than men to be sent home from the emergency room without proper cardiac testing.
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death for women in the United States, according to the CDC, and high blood pressure in women is frequently underdiagnosed and undertreated.
A 2024 study covered by Nature analyzing emergency department visits found that women waited longer to be seen and were less likely to receive pain medication than men, a pattern that held regardless of the treating clinician's gender.
Among patients living with autoimmune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, of whom more than 80 percent are women.
I include these not to alarm anyone, but because I think patients deserve to know that what they've experienced has been studied, quantified, and published in serious medical journals. This is not a perception problem. It's a pattern.
"I tell my patients: your symptoms are data. If a lab value comes back in the 'normal' reference range but you still feel unwell, that is not the end of the investigation. That's the beginning of a better question." - Dr. Ariel Brooks
Why This Happens, Even With Good Doctors
I want to be fair to my colleagues here, because I don't think this pattern exists because most physicians are indifferent. A few structural realities make it more likely, regardless of intent:
The average primary care visit in a traditional insurance-based model runs somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes. That is not enough time to trace fatigue back through thyroid function, iron stores, sleep architecture, and hormonal status. It's enough time to address the single most urgent complaint and schedule a follow-up.
Historically, much of clinical research, including cardiovascular research, was conducted primarily on male subjects, which means some of the "classic" symptom presentations doctors are trained to recognize are, in fact, male presentations. A woman having a heart attack may not describe crushing chest pain. She may describe nausea, jaw discomfort, or overwhelming fatigue, symptoms that get triaged differently.
And when a workup doesn't turn up an obvious answer quickly, the fallback in a rushed system is often to attribute the symptom to stress, mood, or "normal aging," because that requires no further testing and no further appointment time. It is a system problem before it is a bias problem, though the research suggests both are at work.
What Being Taken Seriously Actually Requires
In my practice, being taken seriously isn't a feeling I try to create through better bedside manner alone. It's a structural outcome of how the practice is built. A few things make it possible:
Time. Concierge visits at Asklia are not capped at 15 minutes. When a patient describes a cluster of symptoms, I have the room to actually trace them to a cause instead of triaging the loudest one.
Continuity. I'm the same physician every visit, which means I remember what a patient's baseline actually looks like, not just what's in the chart from someone else's exam three years ago.
Credential depth. As a board-certified internist with additional certification in obesity medicine and menopause care, I'm equipped to connect metabolic, hormonal, and primary care symptoms in one relationship instead of sending a patient to three separate specialists who never speak to each other.
Direct access. Patients can message me directly. A new or worsening symptom doesn't have to wait for the next scheduled annual physical to get addressed.
I've written before about how more time with your doctor changes clinical outcomes, and about why that time matters more than most patients realize. This is the same principle applied specifically to the experience of being dismissed. Time is not a luxury add-on. It is the clinical tool that makes a real investigation possible.
This is also why I've written previously that menopause is not just aging, and why I think of chronic stress as a primary care issue rather than something to manage on your own. Both of those posts describe the same underlying problem from different angles: symptoms that get labeled as normal life instead of getting properly investigated.
The Conversation Doesn't Have to Wait
If you've spent years explaining the same symptoms to different doctors and getting the same shrug in response, I want you to know that reaction says something about the system you've been navigating, not about you or the accuracy of what you're describing. You are not exaggerating. You are not "too sensitive." You are describing real physiology that deserves a real workup.
A concierge model isn't a scheduling perk. It's a structural answer to exactly this problem: enough time, enough continuity, and enough clinical depth to trace a symptom to its actual origin instead of its most convenient label. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, you can review our Membership & Services options or schedule a Meet + Greet to talk it through directly. You can also read more about what concierge primary care actually means before deciding if it's the right fit.
You deserve a physician relationship where your symptoms are treated as clinical evidence, not inconvenient noise. That's the whole point of the practice I built.
