> In general patients are very noisy information sources that will tell you lots of spurious things which turn out to be nothing.
Maybe I'm misreading the above statement, but isn't it the responsibility of medical professionals to ask right questions? How could medically illiterate people be not noisy, when they don't know the causal relationship between medical phenomena.
Women aren't more "neurotic", that simply isn't true (and jesus dude, 1950s much?).
There is extensive literature out there just a google away on the consistent misdiagnosis and under-treatment of women, both as a general trend and for particular diagnoses like heart attack or ADHD. The dismissal of "It's not a woman specific thing" belies the truth that there are women-specific biases against taking self-reported symptoms into account and receiving proper care, and data-collection biases where there simply isn't as much or as sufficient research in how the same disease presents differently in women.
Similar data exists for other groups (for example, pain treatment disparities for black people, because actual doctors with medical degrees think black people have "thicker skin" or "less nerve endings"), but we can acknowledge several kinds of systemic failure of medicine to meet the needs of whole classes of patients without undermining the rightful complains of those individual groups.
I looked it up and women are more neurotic on average, apparently (using the Big Five personality trait definition). specifically, GAD and panic disorder are nearly twice as common in women [1], and somatic symptom disorder (preoccupation with symptoms) is 10x more commonly diagnosed in women [2] (though [3] suggests the true prevalence may be much more equal.)
this isn't surprising to me, as a woman with several anxiety disorders - sex hormones have profound effects on the brain, and it matches my experience.
the issue is that doctors see more neurotic women than men who present with complaints that turn out to be benign, so they become dismissive. but women still get sick, even us hypochondriacs, so having a doctor primed to dismiss your issues is dangerous.
I don't think "on average" is a very useful metric in general (unless you're also narrowing the qualification greatly via other metrics too, to shrink the pool of people that contribute to the average), because that tends to subconsciously translate to "default assumption".
"The big five" has not been shown to be predictive, or useful scientifically, and is more an artifact of the statistical modelling used to interpret the data, which is heavily based on interpretation, which makes it prone to the normal human failures and biases.
> Women aren't more "neurotic", that simply isn't true
They're half a standard deviation more neurotic and have a very slightly wider distribution[1]. This means that there won't be much difference between the average man and woman but that the extremes of neuroticism that doctors experience (and memory!) will be biased towards will be heavily woman dominated.
That's sufficiently incorrect that there's an entire subfield of medicine dedicated to how incorrect it is. If you're interested in learning more, this is a pretty good study to start with: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08475-9
