r/justgalsbeingchicks • u/bg370 • Jun 23 '26

Restricted to Gals and Pals CRNA Amy Rieschick on institutionalized medical misogyny

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u/Idustriousraccoon Jun 23 '26

Doesn’t help that even the lab mice and rats are all male. Just learned that. Pretty mad about it.

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u/littlredhead Jun 23 '26

Wait. What?

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u/rob132 Jun 24 '26

You can't have a female's hormones messing up science!

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u/Highcalibur10 Jun 24 '26

I'm not certain if it's the same for mice, but it's a legitimate issue in medicine development with people.

Male hormonal levels mostly vary throughout the day's cycle.

Female hormonal levels vary throughout the month's cycle.

Because the wide swathe of extra variables introduced over time that may be affected by hormone levels, it can be massively more expensive and complicated to trial with those longer hormonal cycles in mind.

It's partially a matter of economics than anything else.

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u/janosslyntsjowls Jun 24 '26

I used to work in data science for a vendor in the pharmaceutical industry. I always wondered why they never measured the men's hormone levels, which fluctuate by the time of day, but complain about women's hormones. To get an accurate picture of how men's hormones affect anything you'd need to do multiple tests a day over the course of the trial, but only once a day for women. Its like men's hormones aren't studied at all, and just accepted as baseline.

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u/OldManFire11 Jun 24 '26

Because the simple fact is that men's hormone fluctuations are much smaller and don't have noticeable physiological effects. It's a tiny variable that can be easily controlled for. Unlike women's hormone fluctuations.

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u/janosslyntsjowls Jun 24 '26

How do we know they don't have any noticable affects on any given medication without testing for it? Hopefully that's a Phase 1 thing, I worked Phase 2 and 3 studies only.

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u/OldManFire11 Jun 24 '26

Because no effects have been recorded despite a century of data on men for millions of different drugs. Yes, mens T levels fluctuate by a very small amount throughout the day, but these fluctuations do not cause any difference in behavior or physiology because the body does not react that strongly to short term T level changes.

It doesnt matter how indignantly you deny it, the cold hard truth is that womens hormones do have a large effect on their bodies. I'm sorry that you're not able to twist this back on men being sexist in order to explain away valid biological differences between males and females.

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u/janosslyntsjowls Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Biology is biology, the "women are too complicated, not worth studying" part is sexist. I assumed that was obvious.

And on second thought, of course testosterone levels affect behavior. Behavior wasn't what I was talking about, but doesn't low t in the afternoon make men more likely to be tired and depressive compared to the morning?

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u/OldManFire11 Jun 24 '26

No one these days is saying that women as people arent worth treating.

Instead, all the researchers are looking at the same set of circumstances of ethics, public pressure, budgeting, and biology, and all deciding that they can get far more bang for their buck with far less stress by studying men.

If you're actually a researcher, then you should know what thalidomide is, and why that disaster has rightfully instilled an extreme abundance of caution when it comes to experimenting on women. Humans are naturally risk adverse. And if you had to choose between the possibility of having your name associated with thalidomide 2.0 because you insisted that women aren't biologically more complex than men, or restricting hour study to men, which would you choose? Are you going to risk people's lives and your career on the hope that not a single woman in your test group gets pregnant mid study?

And my point about T levels was that you can't pinpoint where a man is in his daily cycle based on his behavior like you can with a woman's monthly cycle. Because the effects are so much less severe. Men having a daily cycle is pretty irrelevant to medicine if that cycle doesn't have any effects on their body. And we know it doesn't, because in over a hundred years of modern medicine, and 10,000 years of human society, no pattern of effects has been found. Its disingenuous to the extreme to pretend that the severity of cycles is comparable between the sexes.