Women Do Not Get Same Medical Treatment

I knew from past news reports that women with heart attack symptoms were less likely to have those symptoms recognized, and therefore treated, by doctors. However, here is an editorial that shows that the story is much wider and worse than I ever thought. It is shocking.

From the Comment, Editorials section of the Toronto Star, page AA6:

Despite concerted efforts to fight two-tier medicine in Ontario, new evidence suggests that it is far more prevalent than anyone believed.

But the kind of two-tier medicine highlighted in a study to be published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal next month is not a result of public versus private care. It is found to exist throughout the intensive care units of Ontario's publicly funded hospitals and shows up in the treatment that women receive compared with men.

The study of nearly 500,000 patient records at 14 Ontario hospitals in 2001 and 2002 found that although more women were admitted than men, fewer received intensive care unit, or ICU, treatment - even when their illnesses warranted it.

Severely ill women were one-third less likely to be admitted to ICU's than men with comparable conditions. And women who were treated in intensive care units tended to be discharged earlier than men and were less likely to be given crucial therapies, such as mechanical ventilation. The bottom line is that women in intensive care were 20 per cent more likely to die than men.

While decisions made by family members in end-of-life treatment may explain some of these differences, they are consistent with many other studies showing gender-based biases in medical treatment.

More research is clearly needed to pinpoint the reasons for these disparities and the root causes of gender-biased medicine.

At the same time, though, women should not have to keep dying needlessly while the health-care profession explores the reasons for the differences in its approach to women and men.

Because these kinds of biases are likely to occur only on a subconscious level, practitioners must be made aware of them by bringing them to the surface. Accordingly, protocols and checks should immediately be put in place requiring doctors and other health-care providers to ask themselves when treating women whether they would prescribe the same treatment plan if the patient were a man.

And hospitals should be monitoring treatments and outcomes on a gender basis to see if efforts to reduce the disparities between men and women are having any real impact.