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‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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That privilege had its price.
Our medical knowledge didn't come from from doctors sitting down with pen and paper and figuring stuff out. It came from field research, trail and error on alive and dead subjects. Subjects that two world wars provided by the millions. It just so happened to be that those subjects were mostly white men between 14 and 50 years of age in dire need of medical treatment. Naturally our knowledge of male physiology skyrocketed during and after that period. On the contrary, when it comes to psychology, men are light years behind women. While trying to """cure female hysteria""", we got a far deeper look into the function of our brains on the female side than on the male side. Even though most of these women took part as voluntarily as someone would take shrapnel in the war. I'm trying to say that it's not just as simple as men or women have it better, it all boils down to historical availability of patients for research.
@LouNeko @rephlekt2718
It also developed from scientists trying to keep things simple. Women's bodies are a lot more complicated than men's in terms of varying ratios of hormones, pregnancy, etc that have to be accounted for in studies. Same reason HeLa cells and genetically-identical mice are used.
It's still not a justifiable reason to neglect 50% of the population under the incorrect assumption that human physiology is the same across the board.
I'm not sure who's worse. The people planning research who still mistakenly believe that it's correct to just study one group and presume it applies to a group that would have been more complicated to study or the ones who know it doesn't work that way but just pretend it does because it's more convenient.
Don't get me wrong, there are contexts where doing an imperfect job now and trying to fill in the details later is the best strategy. But I don't believe that's actually what's going on most of the time.
It's true that wartime produces massive leaps forward in all sorts of technology. And the military does use and abuse soldiers (of all sexes) for research. But patients involved in medical research are almost always ordinary people, recruited by their doctors. And we've only been doing medical research properly since the 1970s, after the thalidomide scandal happened. The first randomised controlled trial was conducted in 1948.
Most trials avoid recruiting pregnant women, despite the fact that if the trials are successful the treatments will be used in pregnant women (unless known to be mutagenic from animal studies) without any testing at all.
And many trials exclude women because of the risk of pregnancy, or hormonal fluctuations making it more complicated to interpret results (despite hormonal fluctuations in men being just as wild but much less predictable).
I know you feel hard done by. But your perspective is warped. We still have medical professionals debating whether the female orgasm exists, FFS.
As far as I know, treatments for "hysteria" tended to range from quackery at best to sexual assault at worst. You're going to have to do a lot better than a bare unsupported asstertion if you want me to believe science actually learned anything of value from it.
That's why I put it in triple quotes, because I know that hysteria research is questionable at best and straight torture at worst.