It's Different For Girls:Women, Wellness, and Woo.

Vulvodynia, or 'depressed vagina', is a very common condition though it's one that's rarely spoken about. I've certainly never heard of it before last night. The vagina is not actually depressed, that name comes from the fact that sometimes - for example in the case of Charlotte from Sex And The City - antidepressants are prescribed for the condition. It's actually a pain in the vulva which makes (penetrative) sex painful.

Roughly 20% of women will suffer from vulvodynia at some point in their life which is comparable to the amount of men who will, at some point, suffer from erectile dysfunction. On average, each year, there are roughly five hundred medical papers released concerning vulvodynia. In the case of erectile dysfunction that number is approximately ten thousand.

Twenty times as many. That fact, alone, demonstrates that last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, Women, Wellness, and Woo (and there's a title that just begs to be sung to the tune of Hawkwind's Quark, Strangeness, and Charm) with Dr Alice Howarth, was still as relevant as it would have been at pretty much any time in modern history.

I'd missed the first couple of the minutes of the talk, I was removing a splinter from my foot, and when I finally logged on it took me a little while to catch up. Dr Howarth was showing slides relating to the definition of disability under the Equality Act 2010 and telling us that in England and Wales 17.8% of the population are considered to have a disability and that it is suspected that this figure is on the rise. Since Covid arrived more people are on long term sick for sure.

This was interesting but I didn't feel it was necessarily pertinent to the talk. But then Dr Howarth was obviously very concerned that she got her message across clearly. She spent quite a while explaining that when she spoke about women she included trans women and when she spoke about men this included trans men. She then also had to qualify that when she spoke of people with certain anatomical parts this didn't mean she thought that necessarily made them either men or women.

I understood, and respected, her reasons for doing this but it ate into the lecture a bit. Let's go back to vulvodynia. It is believed that only about 60% of sufferers seek medical treatment for the condition and of those that do 40% are never diagnosed. Even for those who do get a diagnosis, there is no standard care protocol.

It's a clear example of where women get worse health outcomes than men. Some of this is down to medical bias where certain conditions (like ME, chronic fatigue, and depression) are not taken as seriously by some people as others. Women presenting with painful conditions are more likely to be given sedatives than pain relief, women are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack, and women are half as likely to be given pain relief for coronary bypasses.

While 70% of people who suffer with chronic pain are women it seems that 80% of studies on chronic pain have involved men. Or, and I felt this slightly undid the point a bit, male mice.

Endometriosis affects a large number of women (or people who have uteruses/uteri). It doesn't sound much fun. It can cause pelvic pain, constipation, diarrhoea, debilitating period pain, sickness, blood in one's urine, pain during sex, and difficulty getting pregnant. It's not a newly discovered condition. It's been known about for over two thousand years. Yet it still takes, on average, eight years to get a diagnosis. 58% of people suffering with endometriosis will visit their GP over ten times before any action is taken.

So, and these are Dr Howarth's words - with tongue very much in cheek - and not mine, vaginas and uteruses are difficult and confusing and women get all hormonal so they're bound to be difficult to deal with but what about medical stuff that's not to do with specific anatomy. What about, for example, oral contraception? What about the pill?

It has been known for decades that it is perfectly safe to take the pill every day but it was only as recently as 2019 that this became acceptable and standard medical advice. Why? Because the way you take the pill has, until very recently, had more to do with the Pope than your own health.

The American obstetrician and gynaecologist John Rock, in 1963, released a book called The Time Has Come:A Catholic Doctor's Proposal To End The Battle Over Birth Control. Rock was a firm advocate for oral contraception and for women's choice. He sincerely believed the Catholic church would agree it is reasonable for believers to make use of the pill (!) but he kept a few bits in the book to keep the Pope on side. 

We all know how that panned out. It was yet more evidence that women, often, get worse health outcomes than men. When you add in medical biases, subjective health conditions, social pressures, and work/life balance pressures these can become exacerbated. I'm not a woman but I can see that.

So Dr Howarth had told us about women and wellness but so far we'd not had much 'woo' and I always enjoy a bit of woo. Not actually undergoing it but hearing about how bonkers some of it is. It's also deadly serious as well because people who rely on woo are often harming themselves and enriching and promoting some very ill intentioned people.

There was some brief stuff about a natural cycle app (so you can practise the rhythm method to avoid pregnancy) that doesn't work but it got better when Dr Howarth got on to Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop and that company's rose quartz yoni egg. It's a quartz 'egg' that you put up your fanny. It dissolves emotional wounds and fears, it releases feminine energy and nourishment, and it supports your bladder, your uterus, and your rectum.

All that and so much more besides. Except it didn't do any that and was found not to in a court of law. Goop ended up paying $145,000 in what the press described as a 'vaginal law suit'. That hasn't stopped them selling the yoni eggs and it hasn't stopped them continuing to make unproven claims for what they can do. One thing the Goop website doesn't mention is that the eggs are porous and can transfer bacteria to a place you really don't want bacteria.

Also on the market, 'herb balls' that are used to 'detox', or clean, your vagina (SPOILER ALERT:vaginas clean themselves)  and there's loads of other stuff (rhizoma, motherwort, barneol, and angelica) that's pretty unpleasant and considered by experts to be completely useless too (we didn't have time to go into each individual case) and then there's 'vaginal steaming'.

Which is wrongly said to relieve stress, fatigue, depression, and headaches and cure infertility. It doesn't. But there are cases where women have ended up burning themselves when attempting a vaginal steam. Which doesn't sound very pleasant.

Despite not possessing the genitals most in focus during last night's talk, I must admit I winced a few times. But, that aside, it was an interesting talk and for that I think Skeptics in the Pub - Online, Clio Bellenis of the Winchester branch for hosting, and Dr Alice Howarth for giving a talk of interest to men and women. Whatever genitals they may or may not have.