Katie Couric Says Medicine Has Spent Decades Treating Women as “Small Men With Boobs,” and the PMS-Versus-Erectile-Dysfunction Funding Gap Proves It
Couric has spent the last 5 or 6 years buried in research for a documentary on how women’s health got left behind. She’s making it with director Dawn Porter and Emmy-winning director Esther Mireya, and the numbers stacked up fast.
Women weren’t required to be included in clinical trials until 1993. Scientists didn’t routinely separate male and female subjects in studies until about 10 years ago.
She says women were long treated in medicine as “small men with boobs,” left out of research because their hormones were thought to “screw up” the data.
Then she laid out the scale of it: “Women have been so ignored, dismissed, marginalized. 1% of global research dollars and investment and innovation is invested in women’s health other than cancer. Women take an average of four extra years to be diagnosed than men.”
On endometriosis, she says the average time to a diagnosis is 10 years, and 50% of women who have it are walking around undiagnosed. 80% of autoimmune diseases affect women. ACL rehab protocols were built on studies of men, not women athletes.
Alzheimer’s hit her hardest. 2 out of 3 people with Alzheimer’s are female, and only 12% of research dollars go specifically to female Alzheimer’s.
She points to crash-test dummies as the tell. For decades they were modeled on men, women turned out to be more likely to be injured in head-on collisions, and female dummies still aren’t required in testing until 2028. Only half of medical schools even teach courses in women’s health.
Her documentary “Hormonal” traces it from puberty to old age. Her goal, in her words, is to “make people mad and say you know what, this isn’t right, we’re not going to put up with this.”
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