"Women Still Left Out of Medical Research: Report"

Submitted by Minuteman on Tue, 2014-03-04 06:53

Link here. Excerpt:

'Two decades after the passage of a landmark law mandating that women be represented in government-funded medical research, a new report reveals that the world of science is still ignoring women's unique health issues far more than it should.
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While women are now more routinely included in clinical trials and an entire field of women's health has emerged beyond reproductive health, "there are still enormous gaps in the scientific process as it relates to women," said Johnson, who is executive director of The Connors Center for Women's Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
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However, Gordon said, a lot of researchers don't want to do studies on women of childbearing age due to their monthly hormonal fluctuations, for example.

"When you're doing animal studies, you want to make things as standardized as possible," she explained. "If you add in gender, how do you standardize, especially considering the hormone issues," but that doesn't excuse the disparity, Gordon noted.

Gordon said pregnancy and safety to unborn children are concerns, too. "Again, I'm not excusing it or saying it's an appropriate reason, but it is a concern investigators have," she pointed out.
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Women need to drive the conversation, said Dr. Eve Higginbotham, vice dean for diversity and inclusion at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

"We still have a lot of bias embedded in academic medicine, and certainly it comes down to the people actually doing the studies," said Higginbotham. "Women are still struggling to get to the highest levels of academic medicine. In many cases, women are not the primary drivers in many of these studies."

Higginbotham noted that the highest levels of academia in medical schools are still slim on women -- women only represent 5 percent of medical professors in the United States.'

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Comments

... issues. There are at least two major specialties I can think of off the top of my head that are applicable only to women. Gigantic sums of money pour into women-centered health care causes and campaigns not just a week out of the year, but entire months out of the year, a seemingly never-ending stream of woman-centric health campaigns seeking more and more money and attention at every turn.

But the problem? There aren't enough female researchers. Apparently, it isn't enough that women can get free screenings for cancer at various times and places while men cannot, not even if that cancer isn't woman-specific (e.g.: uterine). Our recent health care law mandates that men must as part of minimum required insurance have insurance to cover the costs associated with having a baby -- even if they are single and do not have anyone of child-bearing age on their policy who can even have a child. Newsflash, Congress: men don't have babies. But we have to buy neo-natal and obstetric insurance too?

Yes, there's still this terrible problem. Women it seems need to "drive the conversation". If men have been driving it these past 150 years or so of modern medicine, all I can say is, they have not done women any disservice by doing so. For 10s of 1,000s of years, a woman could expect her chances of death in childbirth at any given pregnancy were about 1 in 10, maybe more. Now? Well in the first world anyway, she need not typically be concerned at all about this happening. 150 years of modern medical research and technique development, with men "driving the conversation", has saved millions of women's lives and those of their babies (that'd be us). But apparently for some, that isn't good enough.

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2014-03-05 04:19

I suspect if a single man ever made a claim against his obstetric insurance, he could be prosecuted for insurance fraud. So men are now forced by law to buy insurance they cannot legally use. All to lower the insurance cost of women.

And people say women are treated so badly in this country.

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Submitted by el cid on Wed, 2014-03-05 14:36