Comprehensive women’s health care still falls short of its effectiveness mission. nortonrsx/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Among the pillars of family care, women tend to neglect their own bodies. Prevention, screening, sharing solutions… Today they have at hand the cards to listen and act better to each other at all ages of life. Roadmap in 4 priorities.
Never forget you again
Women’s life expectancy at birth is better than men’s. But it has mixed longevity. if, according to INSEE, it is 85.3 years for women, as opposed to 79.4 for men, women live shorter lives in good health. It is a real paradox when we know that they interact with health professionals throughout their lives, theoretically follow a gynecologist from their youth and consult more than men. When they start a family, 77% of them make family appointments for their spouse and children, according to a 2022 study by Doctolib. However, women’s comprehensive medical care still falls short of its effectiveness mission.
reach
“Since ancient times, the male body has been the norm in medicine, making the female body the exception,” recalls Muriel Saleh, a historian of gender studies and medical humanities. This so-called androcentric perspective has long minimized or even made women’s issues invisible. One of the best examples is endometriosis. known since 1867, it has been the subject of a national surveillance plan… in January 2022. In another example, after following seven million patients with 770 pathologies for twenty-one years, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen showed that in 2019, diagnoses were generally later for women: two and a half years for cancer and four and a half years for metabolic diseases. An alarming observation.
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Better targeting, better treatment
Faced with these signals, the authorities begin to put on gender glasses. In 2020, the High Council for Equality stated that “a lack of consideration of sex and gender can cause bias in medical trials and applications”… As recently as last June, a Senate report on women’s health in the workplace lamented the “lack of. “gender-specific statistics” that allow for the development of targeted public health policies. Excluding women from research (as has been the case for a long time due to menstrual cycles and pregnancies) means ignoring the criteria that apply to them, at the risk of misdiagnosing certain pathologies. For example, symptoms of cardiovascular disease can vary between patients, and information remains poor, including among health care professionals.
Vote!
For a long time, patients minimized their symptoms, relegating them to the background. “They couldn’t hear each other because we couldn’t hear them,” Muriel Saleh sums up. But a transformation took place that made the period particularly interesting. Some of the patients, often under the age of 50 and quite well informed, seek to make their voices heard. In search of autonomy, these women band together in associations or social networks to exchange and acquire knowledge. As for caregivers, there are already large numbers of them convening, increasing the number of conferences and publishing books on the subject, concerned for better dialogue. That’s why we wanted to decipher women’s health through the prism of the new emergency situations of the time. It’s also about encouraging them to take more responsibility for themselves when things in their lifestyle raise warning signs of concern.
Source: Le Figaro
