All's Fair in Love and Warfarin?

During our orientation week, we were discussing how medical studies were often biased against underrepresented minorities. I was well aware of how drug companies will sometimes choose to only study genetic lines that they see as more "profitable." For the most part, this doesn't bother me too much. I get upset when I think that some people's lives are put in danger because drug companies haven't done enough research on how the drug differentially reacts with the large variance in human genotypes. Warfarin, an anti-coagulant, is a good example. But it's technically a free market, and there is a lot of genetic variation in the human population--I understand that you can't study everyone.

That being said, I was enraged when my thoughts on this topic were put succinctly by a female professor at the University of Illinois. I found this article on the blog io9.com. It's a pretty good blog, and they post enough science and medical articles to be interesting for anyone interested in science and medicine:

University of Illinois anthropologist Kathryn Clancy, who studies medicine and gender, told me that her "sexapocalypse to celebrate" will come when gender bias is drained out of medical studies. She imagines a world where:

Gender bias no longer influences pharmaceutical priorities or federal funding, and when we accept a wider interpretation of normal variation in human form and function. Issues like why black women have higher mortality rates for breast cancer, or why postpartum hemorrhage seems to strike so randomly yet is so deadly, or the black box of transgender reproductive health, all would be resolved before cures for erectile dysfunction or baldness. Finally, we would do away with all the underfunded, misunderstood syndromes – polycystic ovarian syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome and premenstrual syndrome, to name just a few – and start to identify the origins of these clusters of symptoms.

In Chicago it is certainly true that black women have a higher mortality rate from breast cancer than white women. I actually helped my aunt--who works with public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago--with a project that would help inform black women where they could go to get free mammograms. It's one of the things that I would like to do more with in the future.

But to be honest, I'm also quite upset that no one seems to be working on a female Viagra. Either people assume that it wouldn't make as much money (which may or may not be true) or they assume that there isn't any need for it. Either way, the lack of adequate care for women, of all races, in this country is pretty substandard. It's not just "silly" things like female viagra, or spending more money on male problems--it's larger care situations where women are regularly put at a disadvantage. Whether it's the government putting up legislation to make birth control inaccessible for poorer women, or the fact that female heart attacks are less successfully diagnosed than men's, there's still sexism in health care.