Contents:
- Medical Video: Why Medicine Often Has Dangerous Side Effects for Women | Alyson McGregor | TED Talks
- Drug side effects on a woman's body are known too late
- The woman's body metabolizes the drug more slowly than men
- The female reproductive system also affects drug side effects
- What is the impact on women's health?
Medical Video: Why Medicine Often Has Dangerous Side Effects for Women | Alyson McGregor | TED Talks
If you have a cold or your feet are dislocated, no matter you are a woman or a man, you will definitely undergo the same examination and be given the same medication by a doctor or pharmacist, without considering gender. But did you know that there are side effects of drugs that often only affect women?
Drug side effects on a woman's body are known too late
A study shows that 80% of drugs withdrawn from the market are caused by side effects in women. Why have these drug side effects just been discovered after the drug has been released to the market?
Did you know that it took a long time to release drugs to the market? Starting from just an idea, then tested on cells in the laboratory, animal studies, and until tested clinically in humans, and finally through regulatory approval procedures, until finally available to doctors to treat you. So, why are they late in finding side effects that only occur in one sex? What is this really?
Institute of Medicine say that every cell has a gender. Apparently, the cells used in the laboratory to test drugs are male cells. Animals used in animal studies are also male animals, and clinical trials of drugs carried out are mostly limited to men, so the results of clinical trials of drugs are mostly only results based on reactions in the male body.
The woman's body metabolizes the drug more slowly than men
Why are men the basis for medical research? Let's look at an example of research in men with an Ambien sleeping pill.
Ambiens were sold on the market more than 20 years ago, and hundreds of millions of recipes have been written, especially for women because women experience more sleep disorders than men. However, right in the year before, the FDA recommended reducing half the dose for women, because they only realized that women metabolized this drug with a lower rate of speed than men. This makes women wake up in the morning with many of the remaining active drugs in their system.
And then, women feel sleepy and not fresh enough to drive, so it becomes more risky to get involved in an accident.
The female reproductive system also affects drug side effects
World War II changed many things, and one of them was the need to protect people from the threat of becoming victims of unauthorized medical research. So a set of rules was made, and one of them was the desire to protect women of childbearing age from being involved in any medical research.
Simply put like this: What if something happens to a woman's fertility during research? Who will be responsible for this? Therefore, researchers at that time tended to feel safer to use male respondents in the study.
This is good news for researchers, because a man's body does not experience changes in hormone levels continuously like a woman's body, which can cause data confusion. There is a general assumption that men and women are the same in every way, even though the reproductive organs and sex hormones are different. So, it was decided that medical research was carried out on men, and the results were then used by women. This is much simpler and cheaper.
What is the impact on women's health?
Women's health means reproduction: pregnancy, uterus, breast, ovary. These times are called "bikini medicine, " and this lasted until around the 1980s, when this concept was questioned by the medical community and the health policy-making community. It was only at this time that they learned that by not involving women in all medical research studies, they really did harm women, and that in addition to reproductive problems, almost nothing else was known about the main needs of female patients.
Hello Health Group does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
