Wait times: Slipping through the cracks in the emergency room.

A man tells the story of watching his wife suffer agonizing pain for several hours from an ovarian torsion, eventually losing the ovary, and uses that as a starting point to describe how often women’s pain is dismissed by doctors and other caregivers, especially other women.

The story could also prompt discussion of how to account for the health care provider behavior in this story. Do we blame incompetent and insensitive health care providers? What features of their working conditions might produce the behavior this story recounts?

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