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What is Gender-Specific Medicine?

Gender-specific medicine is not women’s health. It is a relatively new science: the study of the differences in the normal function of men and women and in their experiences of the same diseases. The scientific studies of the last two decades have proven that each of the sexes has a significantly different physiology in every system of the body.

In the past, medical investigators viewed the male as representative of the human species and used men as the standard subject for research. There are deep-seated historical and cultural reasons for this, but there are practical ones as well. Women, particularly those who were still in their reproductive years, were viewed as too vulnerable to include in studies of new drugs and interventions. This was reinforced by the testimony of the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II, which prompted an intense desire to protect the rights of clinical subjects in research protocols. Women’s cyclical change in hormonal levels were also viewed as a complicating element in obtaining reliable data; and were they to be included, much larger numbers of subjects were required. Thus, many investigators felt that including females would exhaust the research funding available. Finally, there was universal concern for the fate of an unborn child conceived during the course of a clinical trial.

The decades after World War II saw an increase in women’s power in society and in medicine, and their growing presence in schools, jobs and professions that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. This spurred the growth of a united feminist movement, which among other things, put pressure on the American medical community and policy-makers to begin the clinical investigation of women, as separate from men, and to include them in medical trials. The paradigm shifted from protecting women’s health by excluding them, to protecting their health by investigating their unique physiology. While this was initially met with significant resistance by the scientific community, the result was an unexpectedly rich discovery of remarkable differences in the physiology of women and men and in their experience of the same diseases.

In the last two decades, the paradigm of gender medicine has become widely accepted and increasingly recognized as a crucial component of the description of health and the treatment of disease. The discovery of a substantial body of evidence about the differences between men and women has given us the unprecedented power to answer questions about the treatment and prevention of disease that would never have heretofore been considered. Gender-specific medicine promises longer and healthier lives for both men and women. It is fundamentally reshaping our understanding of human disease and the way we apply that understanding to the practice of medicine.

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