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withdrawn from the market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.