Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

by Maya Dusenbery

Many women in the United States are sick, and they’re getting sicker. Since the turn of the twentieth century, women have lived longer than men, on average. But the gap has been narrowing since the eighties, when men’s life expectancy began increasing at a faster clip than women’s, largely thanks to a decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease. And the additional 4.8 years of life expectancy that women currently have do not come with better health. Women report poorer health, both physical and mental, and are hospitalized more than men throughout adulthood. In their later years of life too, women are worse off than men. When it comes to “active” life expectancy—the number of years living free from significant limitations that prevent you from doing everyday tasks—men have overtaken women over the past three decades. Women still live longer, but men live better longer. This difference—women’s lower mortality but higher morbidity—has been known as the “gender paradox.” Tellingly, from the seventies through the nineties, some researchers questioned whether women were really as sick as they claimed, suggesting instead that women are actually healthier than men (after all, they aren’t as likely to die!) and only rate their health as worse because they’re less stoic. Today, it is well accepted that the paradox has a different, straightforward explanation: women have higher rates of debilitating but not life-threatening chronic diseases. Women are not any more likely to report...