Women’s healthcare has long been given short shrift by the medical research industry. A new executive order signed by President Trump and championed by First Lady Melania Trump seeks to change that.
To state an obvious fact, women are not the same as men. They have different hormones, physical structures, and even cellular differences that cause them to react differently to what they put in their bodies than men. And no industry should be more fundamentally aware of this than the medical industry.
Yet, for decades, the differing health needs of women have been largely ignored. When it comes to medical research, the prevailing thought has been that women are just smaller versions of men. Most medications, medical devices, and treatments have historically not been tested on women, or not tested on as many women as men. It wasn’t until 1993 that women were formally included in U.S. clinical research via the National Institutes of Revitalization Act. As a result, there is still much that the healthcare industry does not know about how women’s bodies react to certain drugs, or why some diseases disproportionately affect women.
This lack of understanding about the female body has led to real harm done to women by modern medicine. A 2020 study from University of California, Berkely found that women are twice as likely to experience adverse reactions to medications than men. A 2013 study found that women with metal hip replacements were 29% more likely to suffer implant failure, possibly due to inadequate testing on women who are anatomically different from men.
There also remain many unknowns regarding specific diseases and the female body. Only recently did research confirm that women experience different symptoms than men when they are having a heart attack. Female-specific conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS, recently renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS) often take years to diagnose due to knowledge gaps among doctors. Related, infertility has been on the rise in recent years, but rather than search out and treat the root cause of that, many doctors encourage women to pursue in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other artificial means of conception. And nearly 75% of Americans diagnosed with autoimmune disorders – such as Lupus, Hashimoto’s, Graves’ Disease, and Multiple Sclerosis – are women, yet there is still little understanding as to why those conditions develop.
Even after the 1993 law, only an annual average of 8-9% of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding goes towards women’s health research, despite women comprising half of the population. This helps to explain why so many women and girls have experienced being told by their doctors that because their blood tests are within the normal range, their symptoms do not mean anything, or they are given treatments that act as a band-aid rather than ones that get to the root of their health problems.
President Trump’s latest executive order seeks to address these gaps in women’s healthcare. The initiative, announced on October 19, sets up a new Division of Women’s Health at the NIH. While the Biden administration created a similar office under a similar executive order, its aim was primarily research. The new order from Trump seeks to build on and expand that effort beyond research to creating actual solutions to health issues women face.
The executive order also establishes a Women’s Health Task Force at the White House, which will be tasked with coordinating efforts from the various agencies. The stated goal from the White House is “a comprehensive approach to women’s health that recognizes evolving health needs from infancy, childhood, and adolescence through pregnancy, midlife, menopause, and aging, and supports necessary policy and regulatory reforms to ensure timely and stage-specific prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care for women.”
First Lady Melania Trump spearheaded the project. At the signing ceremony, she said that previous generations had fought for women’s rights, but “our generation will fight to discover the cures that will ensure a woman can live her life in health and to the fullest.”
God created men and women biologically distinct. But for too long, women’s health needs have not been treated as being any different from their male counterparts. This initiative from the Trump administration is a welcome change and hopefully will spur a new era where medicine affirms the unique design of the female body.
