How to Save 32,000 Lives Every Year

Bridging the Women’s Health Gap

Dear Solution-aries,

When Carolyn Thomas suffered her first heart attack, she was in her fifties, a distance runner and as fit as can be. Yet the doctor in the ER diagnosed her with acid reflux, sent her home without treatment and told her she simply needed to rest. 

“I felt so embarrassed for having made a big fuss over nothing that when my symptoms later returned, there was no way I was going back to that ER for help,” says Thomas, a PR manager in Victoria, Canada. 

Two weeks later, she had another massive heart attack that proved nearly fatal. The first doctor had not realized that Thomas was in the midst of a life-threatening health crisis.

Men suffer heart diseases more frequently, but for women, they are more often fatal. One reason has now been well-documented: Doctors primarily train with the symptoms of middle-aged male patients and often miss the signs of the “Eve-attack.” 

A study of 580,000 heart patients in Florida concludes that up to 32,000 lives could be saved every year if male doctors learned to treat female patients better. This is roughly the figure of people killed in car accidents in the US. 

I spoke not only with Thomas but also with Dr. Marianna Legato, the legendary cardiologist who coined the term “bikini medicine” to describe “the outdated notion that only women’s breasts and their pelvis were of interest to us doctors, because that was the only point of difference between the sexes.”

“I don’t know why there’s so much resistance to the notion of gender medicine and why women are still trivialized and told with a disturbing frequency their complaints are the result of emotional distress,” Marianne Legato told me. She has been instrumental in researching women’s health. In 1997, she founded the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University, and in 2006, she established the nonprofit Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine that she still chairs.

A recent study by the Global Alliance for Women’s Health argues that it’s simply too expensive to ignore half of humankind: Every dollar invested in women’s health yields $3 in economic growth, and the global economy could gain $1 billion every year if health systems treated women as well as men. “The women’s health gap equates to 75 million years of life lost due to poor health or early death each year,” the analysis finds. “Closing the gap would give the 3.9 billion women in the world today an extra seven healthy days a year, or an average of 500 days over a lifetime.”

Learn about how to recognize the signs of an “Eve-attack” and what you can do to bridge the women’s health gap. Read the full story on Reasons to Be Cheerful:

The Slow, Powerful Work of Bridging the Women’s Health Gap

What I’m reading:

Facing a new US administration that is openly hostile to women, science, and the climate crisis, I will continue to share solutions – real science-based, effective solutions for pressing problems. Now is not the time to give up or give in.

Award-winning poet Rebecca Faulkner assembled a poet from the 500 responses Reasons to Be Cheerful readers submitted to the election question: “No matter who wins, __________.” Below is the poem she assembled using some of those responses.

Cheerfully,

Michaela