Medicine for men: Why women often fall by the wayside!

Medicine for men: Why women often fall by the wayside!

Health care for women still has considerable deficits, despite growing attention to gender -specific aspects in medicine. A central problem is that many heart attacks remain undetected in women. According to a report by Vol.at , many women do not recognize the symptoms of a heart infarction correctly. Signs such as fatigue, back pain or jaw pain are often not associated with a heart attack, which delays treatment.

The clinical psychologist Christa Bauer from "Femail" emphasizes that medicine has taken the man as a yardstick for decades, which has led to the neglect of women in research. This uniform approach can lead to an incorrect medication effect or ineffectiveness of prostheses for women. In Austria, gender medicine is usually only one optional subject, whereby the University of Innsbruck is an exception and offers this area as mandatory.

cardiovascular diseases and their perception

A stubborn myth is that cardiovascular diseases are a “men's problem”, even though they also affect women. A study shows that women over 65 years of an average of more than four hours need more than four hours to be in the emergency room according to the first symptoms of a heart attack, while men need about an hour less. In addition, heart attacks in women usually appear 8-10 years later than in men. These differences in perception and the course of the diseases are alarming and urgently require more attentive health strategies. Ärzteblatt reports about the need to better educate about cardiovascular diseases, to better clarify the higher death rate To counteract heart attacks.

women often find different symptoms than men, such as nausea, shortness of breath and pain in the upper abdomen or in the shoulder and lower jaw area. The social stereotypes also mean that women receive rare pain relievers in emergency rooms, even if they indicate severe pain. The doses in many medical guidelines are often based on research that men had as subjects, which can lead to overdosing in women.

The importance of gender medicine

Gender medicine has developed since the end of the 20th century and aims to research and take into account gender -specific differences in health. The annual Vorarlberg women's health day, organized by "Femail", is intended to make women's health more visible and toast discussions about topics such as menstruation and menopause. A position paper from the DGK emphasizes that gender -specific aspects in cardiology are often insufficiently taken into account, since women are underrepresented in many studies. The guidelines for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases urgently need to be adapted to remedy them. dgk therefore calls for a consideration of gender-specific differences to enable personalized treatment for women.

Overall, the need for clarification is high. A lack of research on women -specific risk factors such as diabetes and pregnancy high pressure underlines the need to fundamentally reform the medical care of women. The improvement of the quality of care by observing gender -specific aspects in medicine is imperative to overcome health inequalities.