“If this had been a penile disease, there would have been a lot more money for research a long time ago,” said researcher Maddie Smeets. But yeah, endometriosis is not a penile disease. It occurs when endometrium builds up outside the uterus, causing an inflammatory reaction there that leads to extreme menstrual pain. On the editors of pointer (KRO-NCRV) people had never heard of it, but after a notice was placed on the site, the reactions poured in by the dozen. Not surprising, when you consider that an estimated 500,000 Dutch people suffer from it.
The stories that pointer captured, are a bizarre relay race in which women explain how in five, twenty or nine years of going to the doctor because of serious pain complaints, they were always sent home with a painkiller and the assurance that “it’s just part of it”. Or they were told it would be a pregnancy or an STD. Until a specialist made the diagnosis more or less by accident. “Do you know that it is a huge mess in your stomach?” one of the women was told by the doctor who had performed an appendectomy on her.
From the research of pointer It also found that a third of women with endometriosis take a different career path than they would like and that a fifth stop working. Of the half a million women who suffer from the condition, only five percent are receiving medical treatment.
Enough reason to free up a considerable budget for research, but that is not happening. Not penile disease, after all. Or, as presenter Anna Gimbrère was told: “woman-specific” research often fails. Work is being done on this: “Diversity needs to be better anchored.” These are words that do not suggest that change in anchoring is imminent. Professor Bart Fauser was clear: “It is obvious that women are worse served in health care than men.”
Dedicated illusion robbers
Good journalism robs citizens of illusions, such as that of equality in health care. The makers of pointer are dedicated illusion robbers, often starting from single viewer reports. Last week they traveled to Bergen op Zoom, where Jim Visser fought against the municipality that demanded that he remove the solar panels from his roof. They would affect the protected cityscape of Bergen op Zoom.
The house, surrounded by large buildings that seemed to have been designed by a lego addict with a concentration problem, turned out to have been built in 1958. Owner Visser saw in it “a bit of Amsterdam school” – for the layman the similarity was mainly in the building material: brick . In the meantime, an alderman insisted that rules were rules, that the municipality was absolutely not rigid, but that those solar panels really had to go. By now Jim was busy leafleting (picture of a polar bear, staggering on a piece of ice) to fight for his solar panels.
The clash between people who want to contribute to the energy transition and local welfare regulations appeared to exist throughout the Netherlands. In Haarlem, a plan to provide a street that was not particularly monumental-looking with solar panels was rejected because of damage to “the characteristic features of the roof landscape”. But then, what good is a characteristic underwater roof landscape?
No, rather the Indian family in the Human program Metropolis, who built their house around a (sacred) fig tree, complete with some extra space for the trunk to grow. Every morning there is prayer inside by the tree and there is always fresh oxygen in the house – let’s hope that no welfare committee is lurking there.
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