Maya Dusenbery

“The default to studying men at times veered into absurdity: in the early sixties, observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their estrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women. (Although doctors began prescribing estrogens to postmenopausal women in droves - by the midseventies, a third would be taking them - it wasn't until 1991 that the first clinical study of hormone therapy was conducted in women.) An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn't enroll a single woman. While men can develop breast cancer - and a small number of them do each year - as Rep. Snowe noted drily at the congressional hearings, 'Somehow I find it hard to believe that the male-dominated medical community would tolerate a study of prostate cancer that used only women as research subjects.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“Chronic illness, with its invisible symptoms of fatigue and pain, is largely the burden of women. And it's worth considering to what extent its relative neglect by the medical system is because it mostly affects women, whose complaints are so often heard not as a roar but as a whine.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick