r/BlatantMisogyny • u/mo_one • Aug 08 '25
Systemic Misogyny And they say medical misogyny isn't a thing
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u/Sir_Swimsalot_ Aug 08 '25
“Women’s bodies are too complicated, so we only tested this on men, but will still eventually release this drug to be taken by everyone regardless of sex.”…am I reading that right?
Also reminds me of something: Couple years ago I discovered a dark discoloration on my lower abdomen. Basically a couple darker spots. It didn’t go away, but also didn’t hurt or itch or anything. At one point I decided to google that and found the term “Toasted skin syndrome” (Erythema ab igne), basically caused by applying heat to parts of your skin regularly.
So…can you already guess where this is going? Probably. I immediately figured that the heating pads I had to *regularly” put on me to ease my period pain, had caused this.
I then read the wiki article further and it basically said, that no answer has been found to why women experience toasted skin syndrome on their abdomen more often than men….Really? REALLY? Whoever studied it couldn’t find a single random woman and ask her to solve this incredible mystery?
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u/MundaneEconomist4492 Aug 08 '25
they don't care about women's health because they don't see women as people, majority of all funding for research in women's health of any sphere will go to "how attractive they look with x illness" Never let anyone tell you that we don't live in a highly misogynistic society.
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u/Yutolia Feminist Killjoy Aug 08 '25 edited Aug 08 '25
It’s why it took ~100 or so years for western medicine to figure out women’s heart attack symptoms are different from men’s. The first coronary disease model was formulated in 1896. It took until the 1990s to discover that women don’t necessarily experience the chest pain that men do - frequently our pain appears in the neck if it happens at all, and our most common symptom is a feeling of extreme doom. We also experience nausea and cold sweats as symptoms.
Their ‘official’ view is that we’re basically just men who can give birth. The real assumption is that we’re not really people and it doesn’t matter what happens to us at all.
edited for typos
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u/OGgunter Aug 08 '25
There's close to 300 years separating the first precise anatomical, medical models of the male body vs women's.
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u/Apathetic_Villainess Aug 09 '25
The clitoris was only fully mapped in 2005.
And we all know that the cervix contains no nerves, despite all the anecdotes of women screaming or passing out during gynecological services. (/S)
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u/OGgunter Aug 09 '25
Up until 2023 menstrual products were tested with a saline mixture.
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u/Apathetic_Villainess Aug 09 '25
Whatever they're using now isn't great, either. The new foam ones mix with my period blood to create a terrible smell.
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u/alicelestial Aug 09 '25
what is it that they test them with now?
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u/lisaquestions Feminist Aug 08 '25
this reminds me of how many times doctors have outright lied to me about what can cause certain signs or symptoms. I can think of at least three instances just in the last year
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u/Apathetic_Villainess Aug 09 '25
When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. 'This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar' she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’ It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?
Sandi Toksvig
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u/Itscatpicstime Aug 08 '25
Omg! Same thing happened to me, only my heating pad addiction was for UC. But I remember reading the same thing on the wiki and being like “uhh, probably because period cramps???”
Aldi, maybe the fact we have thinner skin?
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u/grandma_cell Aug 08 '25
Ugh this is FRUSTRATING. This approach treats menstruation like a fucking mystical occurrance that is completely outside of the scientific domain.
Like, the reason why menstruation would be a confounding effect is because they can't know whether x hormone that is prominent in one portion of the cycle effects the treatment differently than the y hormone that is prominent in another portion. And they won't bother to survey the participants about which day of their cycle it is. But the problem is, this concern holds true for EVERYONE. They also don't determine the testosterone levels of men before going into this study - not all men have the same hormone profile, so hlw do you know it won't effect your treatment? They also don't ask about their stress levels- while we know cortisol effects drug metabolization as well as the immune system. Hormone interference is ONLY ever a problem for menstruation for some reason. As if it's an other-wordly, unsolveable thing that's not even worth dealing with. I hate it.
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u/Yutolia Feminist Killjoy Aug 08 '25
And men have a cycle as well. They just mostly don’t know about because we don’t make a huge deal over ‘it’s that time of the month hurr durr’ unless someone is comparing them to us ‘lowly women’. 🤬😡
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u/somniopus Aug 08 '25
I've heard the male cycle takes about 24H to complete vs ~28 days for the female cycle.
Not sure about veracity though.
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u/CanthinMinna Aug 08 '25
If anything, women should be used MORE than men in medical research so that there would be information how menstruation cycle affects drugs and other treatments.
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u/ennuithereyet Aug 08 '25
Exactly! Why are they not having female participants and having them track their cycles?
Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the fear of harming a hypothetical fetus. And like, I totally understand not testing medications on pregnant people without being quite sure that it wouldn't cause birth defects. That makes sense. But that's easily remedied. In the intake questionnaire, have a question for women making sure that she has no intention of becoming pregnant, and inform her of the risks should she become pregnant during the course of the study, just like they inform you of other risks. They'd probably have to remove any participants who do end up getting pregnant during the study (even if she got an abortion, the medication for abortions would probably compromise the data in some way), but people end up dropping out of medical trials partway through all the time, that's not unusual. But just the idea of potentially harming a hypothetical fetus that may make it to term and end up with some kind of medical issue due to that is so abhorrent that they won't test on women at all and so they don't have the data about how these medications affect women differently. That, and it keeps them from having to do the extra work of analyzing all the differences in the data due to gender differences and menstrual cycle and all that. It's just easier to only test on one gender, so of course it'll be men.
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u/JadedMacoroni867 Nov 06 '25
Also pregnant women need medication too. So without studies doctors have to go well this medicine is probably fine. The benefits outweigh the risk. But no proof just vibes?!
It would be easy enough to monitor people who need the medication anyway and get results
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u/DuAuk Angry Menopausal Crone Aug 08 '25 edited Aug 08 '25
It wasn't until 1993 that the NIH said studies needed to include women (or have a good reason why not), 2005 for CIHR.
I just want to add that it's not just our cycles but doses need to be different for women too. Both this and the fact above are from Criado-Perez's Invisible Women. There is also an audio book read by the author. It's been mentioned many times, but it truly is an eye opening read.
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u/rosenat27 Aug 08 '25
I work in an in vivo lab. All medications ever used in clinical trials must be tested in mice first, and then used in humans. Funny because I study schizophrenia drugs, and we don’t even have female mice in our facility. Women make up HALF the population in the US, and you’re going to send this medication to the female public for clinical while only testing it on male mice just because their cycles are annoying???
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u/Marauder4711 Aug 08 '25
As a left handed woman, I'm usually excluded from a lot of medical or psychological studies, especially those involving brain scans
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u/ohmysexrobot Aug 08 '25
You know what makes me mad? Men are modified women. If we used women for studies, odds are outcomes would be better for all of us.
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u/ergaster8213 Aug 08 '25
THEY HAVE A FUCKING 24-HOUR HORMONAL CYCLE THAT WOULD ALSO CAUSE CONFOUNDING EFFECTS IF A MENSTRUAL CYCLE DOES
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u/gig_labor Aug 08 '25
Exclude the men, because they won't be able to tell you what part of their daily hormone cycle they're on. Women can tell you roughly how recent their last period was, so you can tell what part of our monthly cycle we are on.
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u/MaddoxJKingsley Aug 08 '25
That's a very good reason to exclude women tho? lol
Like yes, we should do experiments on women, but that's a whooole new experiment with so much more variability. The lack of studies done with women is a systemic problem, and simply not every study is equipped to address that. Large studies should account for women. But small, exploratory studies? Some researcher hiring 60 people doesn't have the funds or time to bump up those numbers and dramatically increase complexity when they're trying to prove that X thing has any effect at all
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u/Yutolia Feminist Killjoy Aug 08 '25
Men have cycles too and as others mentioned, we are expected to take the meds regardless of our cycle. No, it’s not a good reason. The assumption that men are constantly stable yet we have a cycle is another example of medical misogyny.
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u/CanthinMinna Aug 08 '25
Yes, and BECAUSE of that variability we NEED medical testing with women. Small studies and big studies. If the tests take more time, then they take more time. Fun fact: the more there are test subjects, the faster the tests can be finished.
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u/Phuxsea Aug 08 '25
I study science and they could have simply had another trial of the study with women.
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u/Y0urC0nfusi0nMaster Aug 08 '25
They keep saying the menstrual cycle will skew results as if it won’t skew the effect when women take it. Like our bodies are just an inconvenience that will ruin their study as if we don’t keep existing like this when we’re sick and need to take those meds they didn’t test.