Medical Justice - Now! #genderhealthgap.petition

Federal Minister of Health Spahn,

Federal Minister of Education Karliczek,

President of the Medical Faculty Association Dr Frosch,

President of the German Medical Association Dr. Reinhardt.

Lack of medical awareness endangers human lives!

One of the most important and necessary domain for a country’s blossoming is Medicine and health. The incessant development and the large investment allocated to this field is a must, yet, an important aspect —gender specificity— is usually not taken into account which has the potential to detriment the evolution of our society and indirectly engrave the nonequality phenomenon making a gender health gap that gets widened over time.

Gender medicine (also called gender-specific or gender-sensitive medicine) refers to the special attention given to the biological and social differences between males and females which should imply a gender-specific research and treatment of diseases. Unfortunately, the current status of medical research take account only of a specific target of people as the norm, typically a healthy 70 kg man between 18-35 years old (1), although factors such as age, weight, and gender should be taken into account. Currently, research and studies are being conducted for and with medication using an eight-week-old male mouse. However, the typical recipients of these same medicines are 55-year-old female women (2).

Researchers were able to probe the differences between the organism of each gender proving a dissimilarity between both. Moreover, this distinction was observed for tissues and organs in the human body, thus the likelihood of getting ill, the severity of the illness, and the ability to recover of most human diseases does not match in the case of both genders. To be more specific, gender differences in the heart and lungs were determined, and it has been shown that women respond differently to drugs throughout their menstrual cycle (1). "Osteoporosis [reduced bone density] is often understood to be a female-only disease, although about a quarter of osteoporosis cases affect men." (3).

Literature:

(1): Criado Perez, C. (2019): Invisible Women Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, 195-199, London: Penguin Random House UK

(2): https://www.kdfb-berlin.de/aktuelles/detailseite/article/gendermedizin-aufklaerung-und-eigeninitiative-gefragt/

(3): http://www.gibgeldjens.de/