Why Women Prefer A Friend Than A Doctor, In A Medical Emergency?

Why women would rather phone a friend than a doctor in a medical emergency, explained by Saba Imtiaz.

- Saba Imtiaz

A few years ago, I was on a day-long reporting trip in rural Sindh when I began to feel a stomach ache akin to being stabbed with shards of glass. By the time I got back to the city, I could barely sit still. Nightmarish scenarios loomed: a burst appendix, a kidney infection. I went to a nearby hospital and confidently declared to the on-duty doctor that I had appendicitis. (That’s what watching too much House MD will do to you.) In my defence, I was in excruciating pain. To her credit, she didn’t laugh. She correctly diagnosed me with a urinary tract infection, and left me with a prescription and some advice on how to self-examine for appendicitis.

“Tell your friends too,” she said. A few months later, I found myself sharing not just her advice, but also her prescription with one of my closest friends, who was also doubled over in pain and had no idea what to take. “It was easier to talk to you,” she told me recently. “It’s the trust factor. You can be graphic. And the kind of treatment you advised was very basic and worked immediately.”

It’s scary to think that a friend trusted me enough to follow my medical advice. But over the years, we’ve had synced menstrual cycles and shared great amounts of paranoia, so it feels fairly easy to talk about our myriad health issues. And we’re not alone — women in metros from Delhi to Dhaka trust their friends with their lives.

According to a 2008 survey published in the Journal Of Women’s Health in the US, nearly 30 percent of all women surveyed said they’d shared or borrowed a prescription, most commonly for allergies or pain. And the study found that people who looked online for health information were more likely to borrow or share medicines.