New Female Focus In Medicine Group Seeks Treatments That Aren’t Based On Model For Men
Women have been overlooked for years by doctors who knew only how to treat men, say officials of the Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics.
The organization, a Washington-based group representing 1,500 medical school professors, will release a report at a meeting in Orlando today recommending medical schools begin teaching future physicians how to treat women differently in dozens of areas, not only their reproductive organs.
“All the physiology, all the pharmacology, how drugs work, how different diseases present and how they’re treated have all been based on a model of man,” said Dr. Kathleen McIntyre-Seltman, a physician with the organization. “No one knows whether that results in mistreatment. Medical science doesn’t know that answer, because that work hasn’t been done.”
Today’s recommendation is part of a trend in medicine of focusing on women’s health, said Dr. Elliott Wolfe, a dean at Stanford University School of Medicine, which for the past two years has offered a course in women’s health. “This will be taken very, very seriously - absolutely,” Wolfe said.
It’s possible in future years women’s health will become a specialty separate from obstetricians and gynecologists, who traditionally have been viewed as women’s doctors. Already, he said, some internists have set up practices treating only women.
Congress mandated in 1992 that all medical schools incorporate women’s health issues into their classes, said Roberta Bartlett, a spokeswoman for the Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics. Today’s guidelines are designed to help medical schools figure out how to do that, Bartlett said.
“We want to make sure every medical student is competent in women’s health,” she said.
It’s been about 30 years since the medical profession began to recognize that women and men respond differently and show different symptoms to various diseases, said Leilani Doty, a professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
“But it’s just in the last couple of years people have said ‘women’s health,”’ Doty said. “It just didn’t exist. We’re at the groundbreaking of this.”
The recent emphasis on women’s health is partly due to the soaring number of women studying medicine, she said.
“This year there are many medical schools that have 50 percent or more women,” Doty said. “That’s just a wave of influence.”
The association recommends all graduate students should be familiar with Pap smears, symptoms of rape and sexually transmitted diseases. Those are issues students would learn about in the obstetrics and gynecology training already required for almost all medical students.
But it also includes understanding of autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that strike women more often than men. The guidelines also call for teaching all future doctors that women’s symptoms of heart attacks and strokes are very different from men’s.
The association recommends teaching about risks to pregnancy not traditionally considered, such as exposure to the environmental toxins lead, dioxin and solvents.
The association meeting at Disney’s Contemporary Resort continues through Saturday. Officials with the organization said about 800 doctors are attending the meetings.