Last fall wrote the AD a piece about how women still receive different treatment from the GP than men. Doctors respond differently to the same complaints. The Radboud University wrote in 2019 that in many medical research, the standard is still the man. How is that now? And why isn’t medical care better geared to women? Marcel Levi answers.
Marcel Levic
Marcel Levi is an internist, chairman of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and professor of medicine at the University of Amsterdam.
Is it true that the male body is still often the standard in medical research?
“Yes that’s right. The best-known example of this can be found in cardiology. In case of heart problems, for example a heart attack, women have very different complaints than men. This has been unknown for a long time and sometimes has dire consequences. And so are many other diseases. For example, diseases of the joints, such as rheumatism, often present differently in women. The same is true for some lung diseases. In addition, much of the drug research used to be conducted on men. As a result, much of the knowledge we have is relevant for men and not always for women.”
How is it possible that this is still the case in 2022?
“The realization that there are so many differences between men and women – in how diseases present themselves and what the response is to a treatment – has only become widespread in recent years. While many of the studies have been done before. In fact, those studies should be redone, but that is not happening much yet. It goes further than just differences between men and women. For example, research into cancer drugs has only been done on white people. So we have no idea whether it works the same for people of color.”
What about new research?
“Nowadays you see that studies are often no longer registered or published if there is no attention paid to gender balance, as they call it. So now it does. The effect and side effects of the corona vaccine have also been examined from the start in both men and women. There has been a lot of talk about menstrual disorders after vaccination and other side effects that would mainly affect women. It’s really not the case that those studies have focused only on men.”
Last week it was in the news that bladder cancer in women is often mistaken for a bladder infection. Is that also related to this?
“Yes, that is indeed a good example. Women have bladder infections more often than men, and when we think of blood in the urine, women are more likely to think of menstruation. While when a man urinates blood, alarm bells start ringing.”
Does that say something about how GPs deal with complaints from women differently than with those of men?
“Absolute. Those differences are there. Fortunately, more attention is paid to this in medical education. In the past this was not the case at all, but now you can see in the medical curriculum that there is attention for gender differences in various places. An important development.”