Monday 2 March 2020

Older women are needlessly going blind. Why isn’t it a national scandal?

Older women are needlessly going blind. Why isn’t it a national scandal? | Dorothy Byrn e GPs regularly fail to diagnose giant cell arteritis, a disease that causes blindness in hundreds of women every year

Fifty years ago I witnessed how the NHS discriminates against older women. More recently, I have experienced it myself as part of what should be a national scandal – but it isn’t because it happens mainly to old women, so it’s tucked away on the health pages of newspapers or on specialist programmes.

When I was a teenager, I volunteered with friends to visit patients at my local hospital, the Victoria in Blackpool. We were sent to the female orthopaedic ward. It was a miserable place. The women just lay there; I never witnessed anyone receiving physiotherapy or any other form of therapy. It was the sort of place you would never wish to end up. The Guardian

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