Clinical trials and studies are
first carried out on adult males. Adult females, children, elderly population,
pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers are less often used in studies. The
pharmaceutical companies are worried about including them in clinical trials
initially or even later on for fear that if some unforeseen ill-effects happen,
people would more likely criticize and sue them for them. Hence they either do
not study these groups or study them after all the adult male trials have been
successful and safe. This means that many times female diseases remain
unstudied and due to this they remain misdiagnosed or missed or remain a total
mystery.
The ancient thinking on women
Women have since time immemorial
being considered as an inferior version of men. This thinking has been there
despite the fact that developing the human body is a female type first before the
male hormones act on them to make it a male. The Greek philosopher Aristotle
had described female as a mutilated male! And this belief has persisted even to
date in western medicine. Dr Kate Young is a public health researcher
working at Monash University in Australia.  |
| Female and medicine [Source: NWHN] |
She says:
“For much of documented history,
women have been excluded from medical and science knowledge production, so
essentially we’ve ended up with a healthcare system, among other things in
society, that has been made by men for men,”
Sad!
The diagnosis of hysteria
Even today, this trend of not
studying women diseases continues. Due to this, women diseases are often
misdiagnosed or missed. If a female returns repeatedly due to the lack of the response of medicine on her, the doctor puts the label of hysteria on her. He
has a knowledge gap there but fills it up with this wrong diagnosis. Kate
writes:
“The historical hysteria discourse
was most often endorsed when discussing ‘difficult’ women, referring to those
for whom treatment was not helpful or who held perception of their disease
alternative to their clinician,”
 |
| Gender bias in animal and human studies [Source: NPR] |
She adds:
“Rather than acknowledge the
limitations of medical knowledge, medicine expected women to take control (with
their minds) of their disease (in their body) by accepting their illness,
making ‘lifestyle’ changes and conforming to their gendered social roles of
wife and mother. Moralizing discourses surround those who rebel; they are
represented as irrational and irresponsible, the safety net for medicine when
it cannot fulfil its claim to control the body.”
Endometriosis and the added
misdiagnosis
Even when a diagnosis of
endometriosis is made in a woman, she is dubbed to have hysterical tendencies.
One gynaecologist told Kate:
“Do mad people get endo or does
endo make you mad? It’s probably a bit of both.”
And another gynaecologist said:
“There’s a lot of psychology, just
as much as there is pathology [in gynaecology].”
Talking about fibromyalgia, another
male GP said:
“I’ve never had a fibromyalgia
patient who wasn’t batshit crazy.”
 |
| Females and their neglect in clinical studies [Source: The Guardian] |
Anatomy: male and female bodies
Male doctors have also stated that
women have wider pelvis for reproduction and smaller brains. Hence they should
stay at home. Dr Janine Austin Clayton, an associate director for women’s
health research at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) says:
“We literally know less about every
aspect of female biology compared to male biology.”
Males do not consider females
anything beyond reproductive bodies. Anything about them beyond this is
uninteresting for science and society. Hence the society for Women’s Health Research
was founded in the 1980s. This male bias is detrimental to women health and its
treatment. It was only in 2016 that NIH mandated inclusion of female subjects
in all studies.
Read on the health benefits of walking!
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