Why is women’s healthcare staggering behind in this day and age?
We have been putting up with the lack of access to women’s health and knowledge on how a woman’s body reacts in comparison to a man’s. We have seen the industry consider women’s bodies atypical and hard to work with, while men’s bodies are considered the “norm,” even though women account for more than half the global population. There is an article that states how researchers have resorted to working on male rats to test their theses because female rats were unreliable and male rats were more stable and less complicated.
One of the most significant problems that causes the healthcare system to lack information is the historic exclusion of women from research. For years, they have been relying on only male participants and working with them because of the assumption that their bodies represented a “neutral” standard and that women were “hormonal” and too complex for medical research. Due to this, many medicines and treatments prescribed to women were never administered to them, and hence, the medications cause more reactions and side effects because the knowledge on what dosage helps females better is scarce.
Conditions such as Endometriosis, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), and autoimmune disorders continue to be taken lightly and not talked about, while women constantly suffer and hear the same 3 opinionated solutions: “You must be on your period,” “You need to control your body weight,” and “I have prescribed you birth control.” For example, endometriosis usually takes an average of seven to ten years to diagnose, usually because women’s pain is dismissed as “normal” or exaggerated. This leads to birth control being offered as a solution; however, it comes with a long list of side effects that often do more harm than good, leaving many women to trade one form of suffering for another.
The lack of information on women’s bodies and the tools available to help them limits the care they can receive, causing a cycle of misdiagnosis and neglect. The daily problems some of the women I know face and the unfortunate pain they push through are the results of medical research, clinical trials, and everyday care for women’s health being consistently underfunded, under-researched, and misunderstood. Watching both my own struggles and those of friends and family be dismissed or minimized has made this gap in care feel deeply personal rather than abstract.
At the end of the day, women’s health care is lacking because women have been treated as secondary in medicine for a long time, and until research, diagnosis, and treatment fully recognize women as the standard rather than the exception, this gap will continue to harm millions. We must demand dedicated, equitable, and respectful care so every woman receives evidence-based treatment instead of assumptions.