For years, physicians have assumed they can treat both genders the same way. But it's costing women their lives.
For years, physicians have referred to women's healthcare as"bikini medicine" and assumed they can diagnose and treat both genders the same way. But it's costing women their lives.The best day of Starr Mirza's life was the day she went into cardiac arrest. To understand why a then 23-year-old would be overjoyed at a life-threatening condition, one that would require a device to be implanted permanently in her chest, we have to start at the beginning of her medical history.
After high school, Mirza"avoided doctors like the plague" until that day in 2002 when she went into cardiac arrest. By then, she was 23 and a bank teller in Cape Canaveral, Florida. She was at work when she passed out. When she awoke in a hospital two days later, the doctors told her that her heart had stopped beating and they had placed a cardioverter-defibrillator in her chest.
Women of color are at an even greater disadvantage. Black women are twice as likely to have strokes and are much less likely to survive them than white women. They are also more likely to receive the wrong treatment for breast cancer, to be diagnosed at more-advanced stages, to have bigger tumors, and to die. Cardiovascular disease is more common and deadlier in both black and Hispanic women. Hispanic women are also more likely than white women to develop diabetes.
Back then, research findings in men were applied to women without concern that the treatment or drug might not work for them. In 1989, a landmark Harvard University study that found taking aspirin every other day reduced the risk of heart attack by 44 percent in people over age 50 was widely accepted and prescribed in both genders even though it was conducted solely on men ages 40 to 84. That was also the heyday for diagnostic guidelines that we now know don't work in women.
Marley Hoggatt, 31, knows the literal pain that can come from doctors who are quick to dismiss female patients. In 2012, while working as a community development specialist for Girl Scouts in Amarillo, Texas, she started getting excruciating migraines two or three times a month. She went to her regular doctor, who asked if she was stressed at work and prescribed an antidepressant. When that didn't work, Hoggatt was referred to a neurologist, who asked about her love life.
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