Male Bias in Medicine: Men Studying Men

Today, I went to an evaluation to determine whether or not I have ADHD. This has been a many-months-long process that I initiated myself. Someone else probably should have figured it out a long, long time ago--my symptoms aren’t exactly subtle. Unfortunately, what people recognize as ADHD comes from how the disorder is understood and studied, and when the field of psychology first began to understand it, they studied it in young boys. What most people associate with ADHD is how the disorder manifests in young boys only. For girls, it looks different, but the effects are no less inhibitive.

ADHD is far from the only case of this. Only now have people begun to recognize and spread the heart attack symptoms for women. Because cisgender men have, for most of medical history, been both the conductors and the subjects of medical trials, medical science has an overwhelming bias towards their physiology and psychology. Obviously, this causes women’s problems to go overlooked. Women are more likely to be dismissed as overreacting or simply told to lose weight. Women’s reproductive health is still a nebulous subject in many areas (conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome, for example, are not well understood and difficult to effectively treat).

This is one of the many ways in which hegemonic masculinity becomes systemic. Our foundational knowledge in the field of medicine is based on the study of cisgender men, which leaves doctors unfamiliar with women-specific symptoms, which leads to women being turned away and called overreactive because their experiences contradict the current body of knowledge regarding their conditions. It is worth note that this is also an issue for people of color. In fact, many physicians will explicitly claim that certain ethnic groups are more pain tolerant than others. ADHD is predominantly diagnosed in adolescent white boys. This inequality does not require malice or intentional bigotry on the part of doctors, but it must be actively worked against in order to improve.