The Partnership for Women's Health is really devoted not to women only but to the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women, and how the manifestations, mechanisms and treatment of disease vary as a function of the sex of the patient. We really know very little about women firsthand. It is only in the last decade that we have succeeded in including women in clinical studies. Often, too few women take part in federally funded research to power the study for really significant findings--telling us whether the sex of the patient significantly modifies the results. In my personal opinion, we have reached a middle ground in which observations made on men and women get sort of mushed together in an amalgam. The data from many contemporary studies we get are neither absolutely true of men nor absolutely true of women.
Women are not just smaller versions of men. We cannot simply extrapolate what we have learned about men and assume--without directly testing the notion--that whatever we know about males on any level of research also holds true for females. This is one of the great fallacies that boggles the mind about academic research in this sophisticated country. I remember talking to the dermatology department about research they were doing in the cell-culture environment on the safety and efficacy of cosmetics for women. When I asked them where they got the cells they were using, they said, "From the foreskin of circumcised newborn boys." When I asked, "Is that relevant to women and cosmetics?" they said, "What a great question."
The challenge is to find out whether men and women are in fact significantly different. The information we already have about how gender modifies human biology is not only sparse; it is also gathered together in a single, easily accessible source. Three years ago, I wrote a tiny book to bring to Procter & Gamble, Gender-Specific Aspects of Human Biology for the Practicing Physician. I knew a book would impress them more than just my rhetoric. The book contains my first pass at collecting some of the more interesting differences between men and women in several systems of the body.
In fact, a man's and a woman's normal function differs beyond the bikini.
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This difference extends to every system of the body. The experience of disease is also importantly modified by gender. My field of expertise is the difference in how men and women experience coronary disease. Finally, when we look at these differences, we look at most of them for the first time. This is the payload for those of us who like to think about our research and do it. I feel like Columbus at the end of the voyage; I think we've crossed the ocean and we're definitely exploring terra firma. We are beginning to ask novel and fundamentally important new questions. These questions never would have arisen had we not begun to understand that real differences do exist between the sexes.
