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

by Maya Dusenbery

The research community tended to offer two contradictory defenses for their exclusion of women. Sometimes, they claimed that, apart from their reproductive systems, men and women were so alike that any findings derived from studying the former would be perfectly valid for the latter as well. Women’s health advocates countered that such a claim was simply an assumption, one that should be investigated. Since little medical research had actually looked to see if there were sex/gender differences, no one could say for sure that there were any differences, but no one could say for sure that there weren’t either. Besides, this argument was more a post hoc attempt at validating the results from all-male studies, as opposed to an explanation for them. After all, if there really were no significant differences between the sexes, then there were also no grounds for excluding women. It also raised the obvious question: If researchers were so confident that it was fine to extrapolate findings on one sex to the other, why didn’t it ever seem to go the opposite way? This excuse looked especially suspect since the biomedical community also offered the exact opposite argument. Instead of claiming that the sexes were so similar that women could be properly represented by men in a study, researchers claimed women were so different from men that including women would destroy the homogeneity of the study population and “confuse” the results. A mixed-sex study would require a larger subject p...