THE SILENT TREATMENT

TOO OFTEN, WOMEN IN CANADA ARE DISMISSED, NEGLECTED OR MISDIAGNOSED BY THEIR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS. A NEW ALLIANCE WANTS TO CHANGE THAT FOR GOOD.

- CHRISTINA FRANGOU

THREE YEARS AGO, Sharlene Rutherford, president, and CEO of the Alberta Women’s Health Foundation, watched her mom with worry. Her mother was struggling with pain, heart irregularities, and anxiety—things that would come up out of the blue. During a doctor’s visit, her mother gave a rundown of what she was going through. “He looked at her, pointed to his head, and said, ‘I think it’s all up here,’” Rutherford recalls. But the family knew he was wrong. They pushed for more testing. And blood tests showed her mom was suffering from metal poisoning.

The clue had been in her medical records all along. The problem was in her hip, where a joint replacement device implanted more than a decade earlier was wearing down, releasing cobalt into her bloodstream. It’s a severe and well-known complication from a kind of metal-on-metal hip implant.

“This took way longer than it should have [to figure out],” says Rutherford. Her mother underwent a hip replacement two years ago to change the faulty device, but she’s still recovering.

Her mother’s story is one example of a problem Rutherford hears about frequently in her work: a woman dismissed by healthcare providers only to suffer lasting harm.

She wants a revolution in the way women’s health is valued, researched and funded in Canada. She wants the focus extended beyond what’s known as bikini medicine—breasts and reproduction—and more attention placed on improving a woman’s overall health across her lifespan.

“If we look at my mom as an example [of why we need change], there was the patriarchal attitude toward her, the fact there was not much research done on how that hip replacement would impact women and her own lack of a voice to question her doctor,” Rutherford says.