Is Gender Bias in Healthcare Harming Your Health?
From your seat belt to your medicines, many aspects of our society have been designed with the average male in mind — often based on research conducted on men’s bodies. This can have dangerous consequences for women, particularly where healthcare is concerned.
Let’s dig into what we THINK we know about four specific topics — medicine, sleep, pain, and seeking care — and then pose a question: Have women been missing out on healthcare that could be better suited for them?
What We Think We Know: Women & Medicine
Between 1997 and 2000, eight out of the 10 drugs withdrawn from the US market were found to have more significant risks for women than men. In some of these circumstances, this may have been because they were drugs used more often by women. However, other drugs showed a greater health risk in women, and this may be due to physiological differences that make women more susceptible to drug-related health risks.
Moreover, before the new regulation in 2022, the FDA required that new drugs be tested on animals before being considered for human trials. Even then, it was found that a large percentage of studies only included male animals or male cells.
This posed a dual problem. 1) Conclusions from previous studies may be specific to only one sex. 2) Drugs that may be useful in women may be discarded at the trial level only because they have not proved helpful in male animals.
It wasn’t until 1993 that the NIH launched the National Institutes of Health Revitalisation Act, recommending that women AND men be included in clinical trials based on the sex prevalence of the disease and to provide data on the efficacy of treatment in each sex. Shockingly, this issue also extends to surgical biomedical research, which shows a significant disparity in using male versus female animals or cells.
What We Think We Know: Women & Sleep
For years, our understanding of how much sleep we need has been based on studies primarily conducted on men. However, emerging research reveals that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t account for the unique sleep needs of women. Hormonal changes during menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause, and menopause often disrupt women’s sleep patterns, making restful nights more challenging to achieve.
Additionally, women are more likely to take on caregiving roles, and they often experience greater fatigue during the day or have their sleep interrupted to tend to others. This shows that what we’ve traditionally believed about sleep might not fully apply to women, highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of our rest requirements.
What We Think We Know: Women & Pain
It’s often said that women handle pain better than men. Even so, a 2001 pivotal study titled The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain revealed that women, contrary to common belief, report experiencing more intense pain, more frequent episodes, and longer-lasting pain compared to men.
Cultural and gender norms have long influenced how pain is expressed and perceived. Historically, boys were taught to suppress pain and avoid showing vulnerability. At the same time, girls were encouraged to minimize their discomfort, avoid being overly emotional, and conform to expectations of being “good.” While these attitudes are gradually evolving with newer generations, their impact persists.
Given this long-standing link between pain and weakness, it’s not surprising that our ability to articulate and communicate the experience of pain remains insufficient.
Gender bias doesn’t stop at drugs and devices, though — it has been found that, for various reasons, women take longer to get appropriate treatment from their doctors. As compared to men with similar health problems, women can be assessed, diagnosed, referred to, and treated differently.
Do some healthcare professionals misunderstand a woman’s risk for health problems and complications? Have certain diseases been historically thought of as ‘men’s diseases,’ such as stroke or myocardial infarction? Have we been trained to watch for symptoms that appear typically in men?
What We Think We Know: Women Seeking Medical Care
First used by Dr. Bernardette Healy, The Yentl Syndrome describes the need for a woman to prove her ailment or pain is equal to that of a man before she will receive equal treatment. It was coined after a short story by Isaac Beshevis Singer, in which a young girl dresses as a boy to be allowed to continue her studies.
In particular, the term ‘Yentl syndrome’ is used to describe the different courses of action that heart attacks usually follow for women and men.
Again, we see that since medical research primarily focused on symptoms of heart attacks in males, women may have been misdiagnosed with fatal results when presenting with different symptoms. In other words, females presenting with ‘male-pattern’ signs of myocardial infarction or ischaemic heart disease have a better chance of being treated in an appropriate and timely manner.
Have women been missing out on healthcare that could be better suited to them?
Despite advances in reasoning and regulations by the FDA, in recent decades, clinical trials have not always adequately enrolled women or even analyzed the sex-specific differences in the data produced. This has continued to hinder the understanding and progress of women’s response to medications.
The reason behind this historical medical discrepancy has been blamed on female hormonal fluctuations during reproductive years, as well as the risk of pregnancy, which could be harmful to both the study and the individual in question.
This led to the sweeping exclusion of women of reproductive age, even those who were not in a position to get pregnant (for example, by being in same-sex relationships or having a sterile partner). That’s how we ended up with so many products and services that only serve half the population.
Consider the differences between male and female physiology in clinical decisions. Sure, differences may lie in lifestyle, environment, and behavior, but key variations at biological and molecular levels could be putting females in danger.
For more information on initiatives to improve women’s healthcare, visit the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) website and read up on the FDA’s Women’s Health Research Roadmap.
**********
For your best “me moment” of the day, sign up for our FREE daily emails.
link
