DOCTOR DOCTOR, GIVE ME THE NEWSIf, as the classic school assignment goes, aliens landed on earth tomorrow (and after the year we’ve had, who’d bet against it?), what’s the one thing that would surely need explaining about life in 2021? How we’ve failed to protect our planet from the climate crisis? Why Crocs have been granted cool status? (Oscars or not, I’m with whichever wit said “the holes are where your dignity seeps out”). Or how about, why we’re so obsessed with finding alien life when there’s so much we need to discover about ourselves? Because despite all the incredible feats of human endeavour, all the near miraculous, mind boggling scientific discoveries we’ve made as a race, the inner workings of 50% of the population largely remains a mystery. And we all know which 50%. In 2021, women’s bodies remain overexposed and under researched. For years, female hormones have been deemed too unpredictable, too complicated, for women to be used in medical studies. (Although here’s a thought - if we studied them some more, they perhaps wouldn’t seem so complicated?) This gender health gap is dangerous on all fronts. For universal issues like heart attacks, it means women are frequently misdiagnosed because their symptoms might not match those of the default male. For female-specific conditions like PCOS or PMS, it can mean years of struggling to be taken seriously, only to be told with a shrug that there’s nothing that can be done. Complicated of course, can be done. We’ve made not just one but multiple vaccines in a global pandemic in just 12 months. So why can’t equally brilliant minds in different disciplines discover more about the female body? Often, it’s a question of priorities - and solving women’s pain isn’t seen as a priority. Here’s something to make your spirit droop; there’s been five times the research in to erectile dysfunction, which affects 19% of men, than PMS which affects 90% of women. This week though, I read about the incredible work of Dr Linda Griffiths (below) which feels like a crucial step towards better health outcomes for women. Look online or on social media too, and there’s never been more conversations happening around previously taboo subjects like periods and perimenopause. But I can’t help notice that it’s largely regular women, underpinned by a few trailblazing doctors, spearheading these developments, rather than systemic change driven by the medical community at large that we desperately need. Despite such a glaring gap in our basic knowledge, the big scientific breakthroughs celebrated by society are all too often in other spheres, like last month’s news that scientists might be just 5-10 years away from detecting life on other planets. Meanwhile on this one, a woman will wait the same amount of time to be diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition we’ve known about for over 100 years. It doesn’t seem much to expect to know how female bodies work. We’re 50% of the population after all! And yet in medicine, we’re often treated like an alien species.
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