My Story: Using the Internet to Understand My Heart Health

CK describes how she used the internet to help understand some of the symptoms she was experiencing, since the male doctors she saw were very dismissive.

Transcript: 

OBOS Today: Did you feel like, like going online, did you, did that like feel genuinely helpful, or do you feel like you like experienced any like misinformation?

CK: I felt like once I sort of got past like, you know, like the WebMDs and like, you know, various different like hospital websites that would sort of talk about things, and I ended up on like more of like forums and women’s health specific websites. That’s when they started to talk about you know, sometimes this is because like women sometimes struggle with like a sodium balance and that can kind of mess things up, and I was like all right, these are like you know real experiences, and like there’s almost, it appears that there’s like a community online of women that have been unfortunately like discounted by the medical system, and also I mean those forums had like feedback and genuine advice from women in medicine, so it was like, you know, I, you know, “I’m so sorry that you had this experience within the medical field. Like as a woman, I understand that this is what you’re going through and like you know here’s kind of me helping you,” so I do wonder a lot like how the process would have been different if I had you know just randomly gotten a female cardiologist or even like a female nurse. But yeah.