by Cynthia Ramirez Manriquez, Communication Director of AMIIF
When the first complete book on human anatomy, The historie of man de John Banister, appeared in 1578, the female reproductive organs were absent from its pages, as they were considered indecent. In mid-19th-century England, the use of the speculum to examine women’s reproductive health caused controversy, in part because of fears that the instrument might induce a “form of hysteria” in patients. With examples like these, taken from canonical publications, public health campaigns, and patient testimonials, the book Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made Worldby Elinor Cleghorn, reminds us that, in the history of Western medicine, social and cultural factors – religious beliefs, prejudices and myths – have played a determining role no less than that of scientific knowledge itself.
Throughout the book, without suggesting that history repeats itself, Cleghorn exhibits the way in which the myths of previous centuries regarding the female body are expressed to this day in the tendency not to investigate in a differentiated way the diseases that primarily affect women. women or to downplay the importance of pain and other symptoms.
And precisely to change these trends is that there are research projects such as “Impact of non-communicable diseases on Mexican women”. An academic collaboration between the National Institute of Public Health and the George Institute, sponsored by AMIIF, which will assess the economic and health burden generated by noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and their differentiated effect on men and women in our country.
The global health agenda regarding women’s health has focused on our sexual and reproductive health, which is not bad, but it is necessary to include the rest of our body and understand how heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes affect us.
As we deepen our understanding of how the human body works, we know that women and men respond differently to disease and possible interventions. We are also beginning to understand that health systems respond differently to women and men, so both access to care and quality of care differ. Too often, however, there is no gender delineation in health data, complicating the way public health decisions are made in a country.
With this study, one of the first of its kind in Mexico and Latin America, we will have information on how, from a gender perspective, the burden of NCDs differs between women and men, we will be able to understand the political and health system context that it generates the disadvantages experienced by women and, more importantly, it will be possible to formulate intervention recommendations to solve them.
*It is called “bikini medicine” because, for a long time, the focus of medical research and practice regarding women seemed to be almost exclusively focused on the areas of the body that you would cover with a bikini.
