http://www.cracked.com/article_23304_6-weird-ways-sexism-screwing-up-healthcare.html
#4. Women Are More Likely To Be Told That Their Pain Is All In Their Heads
For 4,000 years, diagnosing women was the easiest job in the world. No matter what was wrong them -- be it depression, seizures, or gunshot wounds -- it was all chalked up to "hysteria." It was a catch-all mental disorder that basically meant that all of a woman's health issues were a product of her own daffy imagination.
Of course, the medical world has changed drastically since then. Modern doctors use hysteria to explain way more female ailments that their old-timey counterparts could've ever even dreamed of. The only difference is that modern doctors have retired the word "hysteria" in favor of new phrases like "stress" or "psychosomatic symptoms," which have a vastly different number of syllables, but serve the same purpose of dismissing patients with legitimate health problems. These include but not limited to: Polycystic ovary syndrome (a serious hormonal disorder), Lupus (an autoimmune disease), and Fibromyalgia (a rheumatic condition that almost exclusively affects women who tend to be told that their chronic pain is all in their heads).
It's estimated that tens of millions of women in the U.S. are dealing with unnecessary pain because doctors assume that, even if there is something wrong with them, they're probably exaggerating their symptoms. Simply put, medicine doesn't trust women to be familiar with their own bodies.
As a result, legitimately sick people often tend to hide their health problems from their doctors out of fear of being accused of making shit up, even when they might be having a heart attack. Not that telling the doctor would have made a difference -- research found that 75 percent of doctors fail to properly diagnose female patients with cardiovascular diseases if they are also suffering from stress, because the stress gets blamed for all of their symptoms. It's not like a woman could be suffering from both stress and cardiovascular problems. The strain would crush them before they even made it out to the doctor's office.