According to The Guardian, when undergoing surgery, women are 32% more likely to die and 15% more likely to experience an adverse outcome from a surgery when operated on by a man rather than a woman. Additionally, according to the Women’s Health Strategy for England, 84% of women have felt at some point in their lives that their healthcare providers were not listening to them.
Doctors are the people whom many trust with their lives. Whether it is a small symptom or a life-threatening condition, people put their lives in the hands of doctors and physicians. Many people view doctors as individuals who are responsible for caring for their patients and doing everything possible to help them feel better.
Despite centuries of advanced medical techniques and research about the human body, one would think that a doctor would know what is wrong. Many women, however, had their symptoms dismissed as “normal” or “in their heads” when it turned out to be a serious or life-threatening condition.
For example: heart attacks. According to the AHA Journals, 53.4% of women and 36.7% of men who were having a heart attack were told that their symptoms were not heart-related. Similarly, 47% of women and 36% of men die from heart attacks. This is because heart attacks, along with many other physical and mental conditions, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Parkinson’s disease, present differently in women than in men.
Because of this, women are less likely to be diagnosed and therefore treated. Women were never included in medical studies, meaning doctors literally do not know how many diseases impact women, who make up 51% of the world’s population. This leaves many women in the dark about their own health and bodies, which should absolutely not be happening in 2025.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a medication that was often prescribed to pregnant women to combat morning sickness, insomnia and common pregnancy symptoms like anxiety, called Thalidomide. Many women took this medication, not knowing until the early 1960s that it was causing extreme birth defects in their babies.
Because of this tragedy, in 1977, as per the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), women of childbearing age were banned from having medications tested on them. Despite not knowing how medications affected females, medication research trials were not required to include women until 1993.
The biggest issue even today is that even the most knowledgeable doctors see men as a “default” and women as just smaller men with uteri. According to AAMC, doctors are just now starting to teach medical students that this is not true.
Even in laboratories, they test on male mice rather than female mice. The fact that women are supposed to trust doctors with their lives, not knowing how treatment will affect them, is terrifying. There is absolutely no reason for people not to research how women specifically are different from men in health. Women are not the same as men, and in a matter of life or death, should never be treated as such.