Medicine has advanced so much, why is surgery still the only way to diagnose this disease that, according to the WHO, affects 10% of women and girls globally.
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Endometriosis means that you have little deposits of your uterine tissue in parts of your body that aren’t the uterus. Usually, they tend to be nearby (the ovaries, around the uterus in the pelvis, etc), but they can end up in [really weird places like the lungs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoracic_endometriosis).
The reason why it’s hard to definitively diagnose it is you…have to look around to find the tissue and where it is. If you don’t see any, is it because you weren’t looking in the right places or because it was too small or because there isn’t any? It’s [pretty hard to spot](https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1186%2Fs12905-020-01016-3/MediaObjects/12905_2020_1016_Fig1_HTML.png) even if you’re actually looking around inside of the body. We unfortunately don’t have a way of highlighting the endometriosis tissue with a scan, since it doesn’t really stand out on the scans we have now unless it’s really big. There is some work on special scans and blood tests that can diagnose it, but they’re not fully fledged yet.
As for *why* it’s like this? Sexism and a male-dominated medical research world.
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