Chapter 18: Medicine’s Biggest Blind Spot is Still Women’s Bodies.

What Can Women Do To Protect Themselves?

Illustration Credit: Image_Jungle

If you have two X chromosomes, this chapter is for you.^[i] It’s no longer news that women patients are misdiagnosed, dismissed, ignored or gaslighted more often than men are. The receipts are everywhere. To protect ourselves from this barrier to better healthcare, we first need to understand the reasons before we can deploy the solutions.

So why are women’s bodies still medicine’s biggest blind spot? Two reasons:

1. Knowledge Gaps

   1. Missing Medical Research

   2. Missing Clinical Education and Training

2. Cognitive and Gender Bias

Knowledge Gaps

We don’t know what we don’t measure. We’re missing key data in published medical research and in clinical education and training. There’s a huge hole between what medical science knows about women’s bodies and about men’s.

Missing Medical Research:

Historically, medical researchers didn’t seek to learn the biological differences between th…