This past Wednesday I attended a talk with Dr. Alyson J. McGregor, a professor of emergency medicine at Brown University, as well as a 2003 graduate from Boston University’s medical school. McGregor’s entire talk was on a topic I, and many of my peers also at the talk, have thought very little about (if we even thought about it at all). Chances are whoever is reading this also has thought very little or not at all about this topic. Have you ever considered how sex and gender-based research impacts the practice of medicine?
McGregor, someone who is extremely knowledgeable in scientific jargon, someone who has many years of experience working in the ICU of hospitals, someone who has multiple degrees and teaches at an Ivy League university, talked about something that made complete sense to everyone there. It made so much sense that you couldn’t even believe it wasn’t common knowledge.
McGregor talked about how many years ago when scientists and medical specialists began testing different medicines on animals, they only tested on male animals because the males didn’t “vary” as much compared to female animals (though McGregor pointed out that males can vary and there is no evidence that females vary more, making this an invalid argument). At the time, around the 1950s she suggested, this was something not to be argued, probably due to women’s limited access to the medical field and the workforce in general. However, it is now 2017 and we still mainly test medicine on male animals, even though there are so many biological differences between female and male bodies.
People get stuck in their ways. They’ve always been testing on males, why change now? McGregor showed us an abundance of examples of how different drugs that help men can actually hurt women. Men and women’s bodies are quite different, so it is no mystery that men and women will react to drugs differently. Take that in combination with women who are pregnant and you run into a big problem. The medical industry is seeing an increasing problem of not knowing the effects of certain licensed drugs on pregnant women, mostly because these drugs have never been tested on pregnant females.
Already this has lead to years of disastrous outcomes for women who take certain drugs while they are pregnant. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a big movement in the medical industry to push for testing of drugs on pregnant females. Additionally, McGregor asked all the women in the lecture hall what disease they are most afraid of getting and the majority said breast cancer (though heart disease is the number one killer for both men and women). This is a disease much more common in women, as is prostate cancer to men. So why are we not testing drugs on women when there is a very disease, among many others, that is specifically related to females?
The lecture ended with many women visibly shaken, questioning whether any of the drugs they are currently taking are actually helping them. One woman in the crowd even raised her hand and asked if she should just throw away everything in her medicine cabinet. While McGregory acknowledged this is a scary and upsetting reality, it is something that demands attention.
So while I have never thought about the testing of medicine, it seems like something we should all be thinking of. It’s time for the old way of doing things to change in order to improve the health of women worldwide.