By Tashy Back
Many of you who are opening this article may be sitting there wondering what on earth Endometriosis even is. Indeed, I would be pleasantly surprised if you did know. Since being diagnosed a few months ago, I’ve had to explain it to friends, family, colleagues — truly everyone in between. And yet, what if I told you that endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women of reproductive age? That’s about 190 million people worldwide. You would surely expect something so common to be widely understood. Yet, astoundingly, the majority of people are woefully uninformed about it.
The Oxford Dictionary defines endometriosis as “a condition resulting from the appearance of endometrial tissue outside the uterus and causing pelvic pain, especially associated with menstruation.” This tame and clinical-sounding description is foreign to me, and I am sure to all endo sufferers. What it doesn’t say is that endo can mean chronic pain, fainting spells, vomiting, inflammation, bloating, diarrhoea, chronic fatigue, digestive issues, nerve pain, and even mobility problems. It can lead to infertility in up to 50% of cases. It can mean losing organs. It can mean wearing a stoma bag. It can even kill through complications, through cancer links, and through the devastatingly high rates of suicide among sufferers. Hopefully, this already gives you an idea of just how serious and totally debilitating endometriosis really is.
When I first received my diagnosis, I spent days doomscrolling TikTok — which in its eerie, algorithmic fashion seemed to know exactly what was happening in my life. What I found were hundreds of women across the world telling the same story: dismissed by doctors for years, told their pain was “normal,” finally given surgery only to discover that the endo had spread to their bowels, bladder – even their lungs and heart. Some were stage 4, where it’s growing on your vital organs, before anyone took them seriously. Some were told their fertility was already gone. That’s another important thing: the only way to get a formal diagnosis is through an invasive laparoscopy – surgery that takes a month to recover from – and even then, there’s no cure. Only management, and often a poor one at that.
Doctors often try to slap a plaster on it: hormonal birth control, gaslighting comments about “dramatic young women,” and the endlessly patronising reassurance that “painful periods are natural and normal.” (A direct quote, by the way, from one of my doctors.) No wonder it takes on average 7–8 years to get diagnosed in the UK — a delay mirrored worldwide. In that time, the disease continues to grow and spread. Lives and futures are being stolen by neglect.
And it’s not just personal suffering. Economically, endometriosis costs the UK around £8.2 billion a year in lost productivity and healthcare. In the US, it’s closer to $78 billion. This is a public health issue. A crisis. And yet, only 5% of global healthcare research and development funding goes towards women’s health. In an ironic twist, more money and research has been spent on male pattern baldness than on endometriosis. The minor aesthetic concerns of men get better funding than a disease that can grow lesions in your lungs, nasal cavity, even on your heart and brain. Lesions so complex they’re sometimes called “mini organs” because they can develop their own blood supply, nerves, and hormone activity. If that doesn’t sound like a medical emergency, I don’t know what does.
It’s not as though endo is new. It was first described over 300 years ago, and there’s evidence of it in 15th-century mummies. This isn’t some new-fangled mystery — it’s one of the oldest documented conditions in women’s health. Nevertheless, here we are in 2025, still treated like hysterical girls complaining about “bad periods.” Meanwhile, the only major study in 2013 didn’t look at mortality risks, fertility, or treatment options. Instead, it examined how endometriosis supposedly affected a woman’s attractiveness, with the men conducting the study baffled by the outrage that followed. To understand the absurdity of this study, let me paint a more cohesive picture of the widespread impacts of Endo, this is a disease that:
- Affects nearly 200 million people.
- Can cause infertility, organ damage, and in some cases, death.
- Costs billions to economies worldwide.
- Requires invasive surgery just to diagnose.
- Has no cure, high recurrence rates, and woeful research.
- And still is dismissed by doctors and governments alike.
Endo is chronic, it is life-altering, and it is proof of how badly women have been let down. Yet, this isn’t just about endometriosis. It’s about how women’s pain is systemically ignored and belittled. It’s about a crisis in women’s healthcare — one that tells us our suffering is “natural,” our bodies are inconveniences, and our futures simply aren’t worth investing in. The struggles surrounding Endometriosis are thus truly emblematic of the crisis that is ongoing with women’s healthcare in this country, and it’s time that women’s pain was taken seriously. Indeed, even just while writing this article the severity of the issue is abundantly clear as a woman, only 27 years old, has died of untreated cancer, despite 20 prior visits to her GP where her pain was repeatedly dismissed. Thus, I hope that as the eyes of the country slowly start to turn to the crisis of women’s healthcare, the sufferers of endometriosis will not continue to be overlooked.
So, to conclude, no. I would say that people with endometriosis don’t get a fair ride.
Featured Image: Honor Adams
