Better Health & Living: Article: Gender Matters

Issue: March 2008

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Gender Matters

by Susan Flagg Godbey

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Men and women are different.

I know what you’re thinking: Very astute, Ms. Obvious. For decades, though, this simple fact was apparently unknown to the thousands of medical researchers looking for treatments and cures for conditions as varied as depression and heart disease, and it has led to dire consequences.

For example, when researching cardiovascular health, scientists focused on men. Most major studies, including the one that found that aspirin can prevent heart attacks, excluded women—yet heart disease has been the leading cause of death for both men and women since the early 1900s. In the past few years, catch-up studies have been equivocal about whether aspirin benefits women’s hearts in the same way.

Likewise, studies of the bone-damaging disease osteoporosis have focused on women, who make up about 23 million of its 25 million victims. The other 2 million are men—with another 12 million at risk—yet there is no official recommendation that men get routine scans for the disease that can cause bone fractures and even death.

Also, while research has long shown that women deal with depression twice as often as men do, there’s new evidence that depression among men is dramatically underestimated in many ways. For example, men account for three-quarters of the suicides in the United States, a fact that belies the mental health statistics.

Stereotyping has always been dangerous, but when it occurs in a healthcare setting, it can be deadly. That’s why, for this issue, we asked writer Dana Sullivan to take a look at these three conditions, talk to the experts, and come up with gender-specific recommendations for spotting symptoms, getting the appropriate screening tests, and choosing the best treatments.

Fortunately, things have changed; medical research now includes both genders. What goes on in your doctor’s office, however, can often lag behind the times. Women’s heart symptoms are still dismissed, largely because many women and their doctors don’t recognize the often subtle signs. Men, who get osteoporosis a decade or more after women do, may be diagnosed only after they’ve broken a bone. And some drugs and treatments that work for one gender can kill the other.

Medicine is not one size fits all; neither is it gender neutral. Your doctor’s office may be the one place in this country where you don’t want to be treated like everyone else.

Till next time,
gender
Susan Flagg Godbey