The Poverty of Health: Five Years of Being Told I Was the Problem
I had Crohn's disease. For five years, one doctor told me I was bulimic. I was sixteen years old and I partly believed him. This is what medical dismissal actually costs.
I was sixteen when my body started breaking down. The pain was real. The urgency was real. I was bleeding and exhausted and barely able to get through a school day. But one doctor looked at me — a teenage girl — and decided the problem was psychological. He wrote in my file that I had an eating disorder.
For five years, I lived inside that misdiagnosis.
"I won't get any help. No one believes me."
That was the belief I carried. Not just about my health — about myself. I was young. He was a doctor. I had what I'd later learn to call white coat syndrome: that particular kind of deference we're conditioned to show authority, especially medical authority, especially when we're girls who've been told our emotions are probably the issue.
I partly believed him. Not fully — some part of me knew something was physically wrong. But enough. Enough to stop fighting quite as hard. Enough to feel a specific kind of shame on top of the pain.
Women wait an average of four years longer than men for a chronic pain diagnosis
Across conditions from autoimmune disease to endometriosis to Crohn's disease, women's symptoms are more frequently attributed to psychological causes and less frequently investigated aggressively. The result is years of delayed diagnosis, unnecessary suffering, and compounding damage. (BMJ / NIH Office of Research on Women's Health)
I ran a podcast for people living with chronic disease. Of all the stories that came in, 99% were from women. Every single one had experienced some version of the same thing: a doctor who didn't believe them, a diagnosis that came years too late, a system that treated their symptoms as inconvenient rather than real.
One story has stayed with me. A woman who went to her doctor for years with debilitating pain. For sixteen years, she was dismissed. At one point, she was told to stop being so promiscuous. She wasn't. She had endometriosis — a condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, causing severe, chronic pain. Because it was left undiagnosed and untreated for so long, the damage was irreversible. She cannot have children now.
Sixteen years. A doctor's dismissal. A life permanently altered. This is not an isolated story. This is a pattern.
What those five years cost
At twenty-one, I was finally diagnosed correctly. Crohn's disease — a chronic inflammatory condition of the digestive tract. Not an eating disorder. Not a mental health problem. Not self-inflicted. A real, physical, diagnosable condition that had been in my body for five years while I was told to question myself.
In 2021, I had a full colectomy. I had an ostomy bag for two years. I went through reconstruction surgery. Doctors told me the odds of getting pregnant were low. On July 16, 2025, my son Toby was born — three weeks early, emergency C-section, bag not even packed — proving, once again, that what doctors decide about your body is not always the last word.
“The poverty of health isn't just what illness costs you financially. It's what years of being dismissed costs you in self-trust, in time, in the life you could have been living.”
For mothers, health poverty compounds everything. You cannot work, earn, or care for others from a body that's breaking down — especially when the system meant to help you doesn't take you seriously. Your body is not lying. And you deserve to be believed.
Becky Tsadilas
Founder, Momera — Movement of Mothers Ending Poverty. Based in Cochrane, Alberta. hello@momera.ca