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Unasked Questions Not long ago, Marianne Legato recalls, a scientist reported his preliminary findings from tests of a new compound on laboratory rats--all male. "What happens in females?" she asked. "The same," he replied. "How do you know?" she inquired. "Because females respond just like males," he answered. "But how can you be sure if you haven't tested females?" she pressed. Flustered, he insisted that he "just knew." "I couldn't understand how he could possibly be so sure," Legato says. "Then, finally, it dawned on me: Dolly the sheep wasn't the first clone, Eve was. This man still assumed that women are essentially small men." (No one ever thinks of the converse: men as large women.) A lack of actual proof for their premises has never gotten in the way of medical experts' assumption that they "just know" the way women are. Aristotle "just knew" that women nursed their babies with blanched menstrual blood stored in their breasts. Medical illustrators in the Middle Ages "just knew" that women were duplicates of men with an inside-out penis for a vagina, an inverted scrotum for a womb, and testicles for ovaries. Voltaire "just knew" that "the delicacy of women's limbs render them ill-suited to any type of labor or occupation that requires strength or endurance." Physicians of the late nineteenth century "just knew" that removal of a woman's ovaries was the best way to "repair" mental disorders--the reason, according to an 1889 report from the U.S. Surgeon General, for 51 percent of such operations. Even today doctors routinely perform tests, prescribe drugs, and recommend treatments on the assumption that they will be as effective and beneficial for women as for men. How do they know? The truth is they often don't. From 1977 to 1993 the FDA banned women of childbearing potential from participating in the safety tests of new drugs to prevent possible damage to their unborn children and reproductive capacity. To scientists, this offered an advantage: They did not have to take into account such messy variables as women's fluctuating hormones or monthly cycles. As exclusion of women from all sorts of medical testing became common, this ban extended even to women who'd undergone sterilization or were past reproductive age. In a further attempt to keep the science "clean," laboratory researchers experimented only on male animals. As a result, in the landmark studies that shaped many modern medical practices, females were written out--and off. The landmark Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trials (known, aptly enough, as Mr. Fit), which studied vulnerability to heart disease, the number-one killer of both sexes, included 12,000 to 15,000 men--and no women. The Physician's Health Study of the potential benefits of taking an aspirin a day to lower the risk of heart attack looked at 22,071 physicians--none of them women. A major evaluation of coffee intake and its impact on stroke and heart attack studied 45,589 men--and no women. Only in 1998 did researchers discover that HIV tests misstate a woman's need for treatment. Even when a woman and a man have the same amount of virus in their blood, the woman is at a more advanced state of infection and at much greater risk of developing AIDS. Incredibly, even a study of the impact of obesity on the risk of breast and endometrial cancer--female diseases--extrapolated from only male subjectsHales, Dianne is the author of 'Just Like a Woman How Gender Science Is Redefining What Makes Us Female', published 2000 under ISBN 9780553378184 and ISBN 055337818X.
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