Underfunding Research Of Female Health Leaves Huge Amounts Of Money On The Table

“Did you know that at least one-third of women have lower back pain before their periods every month, and yet, nobody seems to fully understand why?” – asked a Medical Futurist team member a little while ago. The question led to a discussion about the differences in research, funding and understanding of male-only and female-only health issues, and consequently, to this article. It is a well-known fact that some diseases or conditions dominantly affect one gender or the other. There are the trivial ones, like prostate cancer or ovarian, cervical, uterine cancers. But there is a long list of diseases and conditions that have a significantly higher prevalence among one of the sexes, like liver cancer or tuberculosis occurring more often in the male population, and autoimmune diseases or multiple sclerosis among the females. Why does a symptom affecting 19% of men get five times more funding than a symptom affecting 90% of women?   The interesting thing is, that figures suggest that although roughly half the population is female pretty much all across the globe, research on female-dominant diseases is underfunded, while male-dominant ones are overfunded.  This is not something that is easily quantified, but this study tried to do this job. It came to the conclusion that “the degree of funding disparity for the male-favored diseases (extent to which male-dominant diseases are overfunded and female-dominant diseases underfunded) is nearly twi...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: TMF Future of Medicine Healthcare Policy Medical Education women female health under-reseached gender gap in healthcare Source Type: blogs