Going back to ancient Greece, women’s medical issues have been met with doubt and discrimination, even though chronic pain affects women at higher numbers than men. There is a gender bias in health care, with one study finding that in nearly three-quarters of the cases where a disease afflicts primarily one gender, the funding pattern favors males.
This week on LAist’s public affairs show “AirTalk,” we’re bringing you a weeklong series digging into topics relating to women’s health care, a vast and often understudied area. Dr. Sarah Kilpatrick, maternal fetal medicine specialist and chair of the OB-GYN department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, says this knowledge gap leads to significant consequences like delayed diagnoses.
Listen to the conversation
Women’s Health Series pt. 1 05.08.2023
Lack of research efforts and funding
Far less federal funding is allocated towards research of diseases that primarily afflict women, like endometriosis and cervical cancer, than diseases that affect men, like prostate cancer, Kilpatrick says — and most of the research that informs direct patient care today is based on male subjects and male cells.
This is in part because there has historically been a reluctance to include women in clinical trials, since it can be harder to account for their physiological state due to hormonal changes like menstruation, menopause, and birth control, according to Kilpatrick. And there is a particular lack of understanding on how diseases and medications affect pregnant women, she says, as researchers are…
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