“During childbirth I felt violated,” says one of the testimonies. “I had hallucinations because the medication was not correct and my body did not eliminate it,” says another woman. “In college we learn that migraine is a disease of women and of little seriousness,” confesses a doctor.” They are some of the witnesses that configure You are an exaggeration. Gender and sex bias in health (Raig verd), a collaborative project between four of the main Catalan hospitals (Vall d’Hebron, Clínic, Sant Pau and Germans Trias i Pujol) that aims to correct errors in research and medical practices to encourage more individualized care.
Led by journalist Isabel Muntané and Blanca Coll-Vinent, attached to the Clínic emergency service, the book advocates the application of the gender perspective in the field of health, from research, treatment and monitoring of the post-illness period, based on the testimonies of patients with different pathologies. “Thirteen diseases are analyzed that are diagnosed and treated based on a universal man model and the patients explain how they have experienced this medicine that does not take sex or gender into account,” explained Coll-Vinent, and called for “rewriting the entire medicine.”
“The body of a man and that of a woman do not function the same, the differences must be taken into account”
“The body of a man and that of a woman do not function the same. These differences must be taken into account to offer the best diagnoses and treatments,” summarizes Elisa Llurba, director of the gynecology and obstetrics service of Sant Pau. Many things changed in this hospital when the complaint of obstetric violence filed by a patient was taken over. In another order, Llurba mentions the case of a woman who suffered serious poisoning from a drug “because drugs are tested mainly on men. Most of the side effects and toxicity occur in women because they are tested at doses adjusted for men.”
Doctors Elisa Llurba and Antònia Sambola
For the cardiologist Antònia Sambola (Vall d’Hebron) it is significant, but insufficient, that this center is going to incorporate an optional subject on gender perspective in the medical career. In terms of cardiovascular health care – the first cause of death among women and second in the case of men, behind tumors – the bias is clear, he states: cardiac arrest is more common in men, but women arrive at the hospital alive less often. “The reasons are an underdiagnosis of cardiovascular pathologies in women; “When a woman suffers cardiac arrest and falls to the ground, she does not always receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation; it is thought that it may be lipothymia.”
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