Health has sex and gender

Women are more resistant to infectious sicknesses than men and more vulnerable to autoimmune diseases; some cardiovascular diseases are expressed differently depending on gender; Medicines affect men and women differently ... One specialty, gender medicine, is responsible for these and countless other peculiarities, so emerging in republics like Spain that it literally sounds like Chinese to numerous health professionals. Part of the obvious: their physiology is different and, therefore, must be the prevention and judgement of many diseases, as well as the rehabilitations applied .

Many studies have shown that the symptoms experienced by women during a heart attack differ from those experienced by men, and the failure to identify them leads to a misdiagnosis and, in general, to poorer care. Almost two decades after the first surveys, some doctors still do not take it into account and only six months have passed since the Spanish Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Protection integrated the gender perspective in the program. Prevention of cardiovascular diseases. plans 

There is a social perception that these questions have a predominantly male profile and yet this is not the case .

Mortality from cardiovascular disease

According to the National Institution of Statistics, 30% of female mortality is due to these diseases, five percentage points more than in the case of men -25% -. The difference is significant and responds to factors that study gender medicine and that could be corrected. The time for diagnosing heart attacks in women is not only influenced by the fact that the symptoms are sometimes not identified with a heart attack; The time it takes to be cared for is also critical. "We suffer more than men, we minimize the symptoms, we attribute them to other things and, when it comes to treatment, it is permanently later, there is always something to do before," explains Natalia Royuela, coordinator of the cardiology unit, at VERY reviews of Marques Hospital by Valdecilla from Santander .

 

These and similar circumstances illustrate why gender medicine has adopted this name. It does not respond to a fad and focuses on the feminine - and in this sense has an ideological component - but what is most relevant from a medical point of view is that it justifies scientific evidence. In addition to the physiological differences between men and women, she considers, among other things, the social roles they both play, an aspect that is generally ignored in health care, but especially because of the repercussions it has on our society .

 

The consequences of a sustained change of perspective in gender medicine would be primarily beneficial for women, because so far, in general, the model of research in diseases and therapies has been men. "This has led to invisible, misdiagnosed and poorly treated diseases. The knowledge provided by the gender perspective would improve women's health, allow a more effective treatment of diseases and could be used to prevent and promote the health of women who are still healthy ", explains María José Cao, dean of the Faculty of Sciences. at the University of Valladolid and coordinator of the course Gender Perspective in Health, which took place in November last year in the city of Castilla-León.

Spondylitis, a chronic form of arthritis - formerly known as ankylosing spondylitis - is an example of this invisibility. In men, it manifests as stiffness in the spine, while in women, the symptoms appear in the legs and hands. However, this differential diagnosis is often not considered. "This causes patients to be misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, for example, when they have a serious illness that requires biological and expensive treatments, so that they do not progress," explains María Teresa Ruiz Cantero, professor of medicine. Prevention and public health at the University of Alicante The main consequence is that some women, from consultation to consultation, take up to nine years to find out why they suffer from the disease.