Are women just men in short?
Accident researchers, car insurers and the ADAC have been complaining for years that crash tests mainly use dummies that are 1.78 meters tall and weigh 78 kilograms. This corresponds to the so-called 50 percent man. But the anatomy of women is very different. Women are lighter, smaller and differently proportioned. As a result, women are 30 percent more likely to sustain serious and fatal injuries in car accidents. The pedals and safety systems do not do justice to the female anatomy.
When Katharina Fegebank, Hamburg’s second mayor and senator for science, research and equality, recently called for accident research to be carried out across all genders, the Bild newspaper ridiculed her for wanting to “gender” crash tests. So let’s look at the unfortunate role women play in medicine, both as doctors and as patients.
As doctors, women have long since conquered medicine, but only at first glance. At the 26th German Medical Congress it was refused to allow women to study medicine. Women should devote themselves to their tasks as spouses, mothers and household leaders and not “dig for treasure in the stony and thorny field of medical practice”. That was in 1898. Today, almost two thirds of medical students are women, and women make up about half in everyday medical work. In contrast to this, it is striking that the proportion of women in management positions is still negligible. Medicine is no different from the rest of society.
As patients, it is really difficult for women in medicine, if they are even noticed. Pharmaceutical studies are still carried out almost exclusively with male subjects. But women also take the drugs, with some completely different effects – this is often dangerous. Many artificial joint operations are still performed with implants developed on the male anatomy. Even so, women get these joints built in even if they don’t fit and cause complications. Symptoms of diseases such as heart attack, depression or diabetes are still being researched and oriented towards men, treatment guidelines are still predominantly written by men – this is often fatal. And diseases that almost exclusively affect women are still being ignored and not treated like any other disease. One example is lipedema.
Lipedema is a congenital, painful and disabling fat distribution disorder of the legs and arms with three stages that was described more than 80 years ago by Allen and Hines at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Lipedema only affects women. They struggle through life with compression pants, lymphatic drainage and painkillers. To make matters worse, you have to endure being too fat or even fat, even though lipedema has nothing to do with obesity. There is no causal treatment for lipedema. Only liposuction is an option. Only since 2020 and only for women in stage 3 can liposuction be prescribed at the expense of the health insurance company. Thousands of women still have to flip tens of thousands of euros on the plastic surgeon’s table because they can’t wait that long to get to the catastrophic Stage 3.
I am quite sure that if lipedema were a man’s disease, then surgical treatment would have long been a matter of course for health insurances.
