Here's a bold solution to women's health care: Train doctors to listen to women. [View all]

At the recent announcement of the White House Initiative on Women's Health Research, President Joe Biden and Jill Biden, who will lead the effort, spoke about "the power of research." President Biden remarked on the imbalance in women's health care as compared with men's. Women cannot get better medical care, they both suggested, without more study on disease in women.

This initiative is a positive step toward understanding disease in women. Unfortunately, it ignores the problem primarily responsible for the imbalance between women’s and men's health care: doctors’ reluctance to take women’s symptoms seriously. That problem arises not from lack of research, but from medical training that encourages doctors to attribute women’s symptoms to their psyches.

First, if gender health care inequity were caused by lack of scientific understanding, the inequity wouldn't be uniform. Women suffering from medical problems that are poorly researched by sex or gender would face more problems than women with conditions that are better researched. The fact is, though, that women face obstructed access to the health care they need, as compared with men, across the spectrum of medical conditions.

In cardiology, for example, researchers have been focused on gender and sex-based inequities for more than 30 years. While scientific understanding has certainly improved during this time, women are now more likely to die of heart attack than men, and more likely to be told during a heart attack that their symptoms are not heart-related. We’re still less likely to receive key cardiac treatments, to be treated seriously by EMTs during a heart attack and to be given electrocardiograms when we arrive at the hospital.

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https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2023/12/13/white-house-initiative-womens-health-research-jill-biden-symptoms-diane-oleary