We all go to doctors,
and we do so with trust and blind faith
that the test they are ordering
and the medications they're prescribing
are based upon evidence,
evidence that's designed to help us.
However, the reality is
that that hasn't always
been the case for everyone.
What if I told you that the medical
science discovered over the past century
has been based on
only half the population?
I'm an emergency medicine doctor.
I was trained to be prepared
in a medical emergency.
It's about saving lives.
How cool is that?
Okay, there's a lot of runny noses
and stubbed toes,
but no matter who walks
through the door to the ER,
we order the same tests,
we prescribe the same medication
without ever thinking about
the sex or gender of our patients.
Why would we?
We were never taught that there were
any differences between men and women.
A recent Government Accountability study
revealed that 80 percent of the drugs
withdrawn from the market
are due to side effects on women.
So let's think about that for a minute.
Why are we discovering
side effects on women
only after a drug has been released
to the market?
Do you know that it takes years for a drug
to go from an idea to being tested
on cells in a laboratory,
to animal studies,
to then clinical trials on humans,
finally to go through
a regulatory approval process,
to be available for your doctor
to prescribe to you,
not to mention the millions
and billions of dollars of funding
it takes to go through that process.
So why are we discovering
unacceptable side effects
on half the population
after that has gone through?
What's happening?
Well, it turns out that those cells
used in that laboratory,
they're male cells,
and the animals used
in the animal studies were male animals,
and the clinical trials have been
performed almost exclusively on men.
How is it that the male model became
our framework for medical research?
Let's look at an example that has
been popularized in the media,
and it has to do
with the sleep aid Ambien.
Ambien was released on the market
over 20 years ago,
and since then, hundreds of millions
of prescriptions have been written,
primarily to women because women
suffer more sleep disorders than men.
But just this past year,
the Food and Drug Administration
recommended cutting the dose in half
for women only,
because they just realized
that women metabolize the drug
at a slower rate than men,
causing them to wake up in the morning
with more of the active drug in the system
and then they're drowsy and they're
getting behind the wheel of the car,
and they're at risk
for motor vehicle accidents.
And I can't help but think,
as an emergency physician,
how many of my patients
that I've cared for over the years
that were involved
in a motor vehicle accident
possibly could have been prevented
if this type of analysis was performed
and acted upon 20 years ago
when this drug was first released.
How many other things
need to be analyzed by gender?
What else are we missing?
World War II changed a lot of things,
and one of them was this need
to protect people
from becoming victims of medical research
without informed consent.
So some much-needed guidelines
or rules were set into place,
and part of that was this desire
to protect women of childbearing age
from entering into any
medical research studies.
It was fear, what if something happened
to the fetus during this study?
Who would be responsible.
And so the scientists
at this time actually thought
this was a blessing in disguise,
because let's face it,
men's bodies are pretty homogeneous.