Why Does Medicine Treat Women Like Men?

May 25, 2020

(The Guardian) – McGregor has set this out in her new book Sex Matters. It’s a wake-up call, a cry for action, a frightening and fascinating read. The takeaway message is that women’s bodies are different to men’s from cellular level onwards, yet our medical model is based on knowledge gleaned from male cells, male animals and male humans. Within this, there’s a wealth of disturbing detail – the diseases we routinely fail to understand in women, the drugs that work in men, while being useless, dangerous or even deadly in the other 50% of the population. In an age where we hear talk of “personalised medicine” and “targeted therapies”, it’s impossible to read this book without feeling stunned by science’s failure to have factored all this in earlier.