I don't agree that male doctors aren't qualified to treat women because they haven't gone through the pain women go through (admittedly I'm biased). I understand where the sentiment arises from but it's an oversimplified solution to a complex problem.
Doctors, male and female, treat people inflicted with myriad health problems which they haven't personally experienced, and it doesn't necessarily affect their ability to solve those problems, so that can't be our criterion for choosing healthcare providers.
The issue here is the quality of care that can be given to patients, if empathy improves this quality of care (it does), and if this improvement in quality of care has any effect on optimal health outcomes (it does)
The impact of empathy on the quality of care is pretty much self-evident. If you can place yourself in a patient's shoes and understand their pain then you're more likely to make an effort to ameliorate that pain.
If you think the pain the patient is experiencing is negligible and they're exaggerating, then you're less likely to pay attention to it. An example is the documented racial bias in administering pain medication because it was assumed that black people had higher pain thresholds.
If we've established that empathy improves care, the next question is if it's innate (debateable), and if it can be developed (it can). How do we develop it?
By learning to put ourselves in other people's shoes, and trying to understand how their experiences shape their actions. Is it possible that going through similar experiences will increase your chances of empathising with a person's pain? Yes it is.
It isn't a guarantee though. Some times people make the mistake of extrapolating their reactions to certain experiences and expecting everyone else to react the same way. "if I didn't cry when this happened to me then why should you?" (this is how we get survival bias)
But pain is subjective, experienced differently by different people, there's no standard "painometer", which is why we ask patients to grade their pain on a scale of 1 to 10. All that matters is how much it is affecting them, and what can be done to relieve it.
How do we gain enough knowledge on an issue to enable us to speak on it with some authority? Either by experiencing it, or by studying and collating the experiences of enough people for us to able to identify patterns and draw general conclusions.
Arguments pitting personal experiences against learned expertise are counterproductive. Your personal experience makes you an authority on how it felt for you, which is valid, it doesn't make you an expert on the general human experience.
Learned expertise makes you an authority on general patterns, it doesn't make the individual experiences of the people you meet any less valid. And learned expertise doesn't automatically imbue you with empathy, especially if it isn't something you're taught to prioritise.
A lot of the medical knowledge we have today was initially discovered by doctors performing cruel experiments on helpless patients, surgeries without anesthesia. Their technical expertise didn't make them "good" doctors.
But a lack of adequate empathy isn't necessarily a result of cruelty, it might be a reflection of the living conditions we find ourselves in, and the pain and suffering we're expected to endure as a result. This is reflected in every part of Nigerian society, including healthcare
Nigerian doctors and nurses might not be as kind as their western counterparts because Nigeria itself is unkind, so empathy isn't emphasised as much as "tough love", because we've prioritised toughness as a coping mechanism to deal with Nigeria's cruelty.
Nigerian midwives are more likely to perform episiotomies because they received them too, we're less likely to give epidurals because labour pains are expected to be endured and the risk of a prolonged labour seems like an unnecessary trade-off.
With improving living conditions we should create systems where more emphasis is placed on empathy and alleviating suffering for everyone, instead of taking pain for granted and expecting people to accept it.
TL;DR: empathy improves outcomes, it can be learnt and applied without personal experience, and it doesn't automatically come with technical expertise. We need to emphasise it more in our training.
Also, it's disingenuous to invoke expertise in a bid to discount the personal experiences of the women telling their stories because most of the men talking aren't doctors, and have neither experiential authority nor learned expertise. Shut up.
