Hormone patch: Women have been medically segregated

Medically speaking, women indeed are from Venus, and men from Mars. This is the conclusion of a recently concluded study at the Brigham and Women?s Hospital in Boston. The study, involving over 40, 000 middle-aged and healthy women, for 10 years, found that the standard cardiac therapy that recommends daily use of aspirin does not prevent heart attacks in women, as it does in men. But a regular use of the drug helps protect women against stroke ? something the drug has not been found to do for men.

The study is the largest one demonstrating sex-specific drug response in humans, confirming the need for a gender-based approach in medical research. The one-size-fits-all approach of modern medicine has consistently ignored the issue of gender in almost every aspect of diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.

From the very infancy of medicine, the focus of all research has been on men; it was assumed that women were simply smaller version of men. Citing concerns of harm to unborn children and reproductive capacity, drug regulators always banned women of childbearing age from participating in safety tests of new drugs.

The exclusion of women from studies became a common practice among scientists who claimed that a woman?s fluctuating monthly cycle would interfere with their research. The findings of such studies, however, were applied across gender, and doctors assumed that similar medication could treat both male and female patients.

There has also been an inclination to project a woman?s well-being in terms of reproductive health. Even symptoms of other illnesses were ignored (stereotyped as ?whining and hysterical woman?) or attributed to hormonal swings.

Which is why women have silently been bearing with pain because pain medications worked less efficiently in them. And they had been found to have woken faster from anaesthesia. They also have been receiving fewer surgical procedures in heart care because their symptoms vary significantly from those in men.

It?s rather surprising why medical researchers have overlooked gender-specific differences until recently, even tho-ugh there?s significant difference in almost every biological system of the two sexes. From the composition of their saliva to the way their guts, brains, and heart function, women are different from men.

So, the aspirin study blows the lid off the medical fraternity?s long-standing ignorance. It?s time clinical research got reorganised, taking into account basic biological disparity in human physiology. Or else, upcoming medicines ? likely to reach up to the genetic level ?will either be ineffective or cause disastrous side-effects.