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by Carolyn Dean M.D., N.D.
Are WOMEN the SICKER SEX?
What’s the most common topic when women get together and
talk? It’s health, more precisely, it’s ill-health, theirs and their
family’s. Women are more tuned into their bodies; are the major
caregivers for the rest of the family; and make most of the
health care decisions for their loved ones. For all these reasons,
women often have an up-close relationship with their family
doctor who depends on them to carry out the doctor’s orders.
But is that delicate balance shifting?
The shift to HMO’s treats medicine as a business and the
7-minute appointment is designed to cut costs—not because
doctors want it that way. Not many people are happy with the
direction medicine has taken—patients or doctors. This type of
medicine encourages the use of prescription medication as the
answer to a patient’s complaints. It has also made specialists
more highly paid than family doctors creating a tremendous
lack of doctors going into family medicine. This gap has to be
filled and is already being filled by naturopaths, nurse practitioners,
chiropractors, homeopaths, and Chinese medicine practitioners,
most of whom do not have the ability to prescribe drugs
and offer alternative solutions instead. Limiting the overuse of
drugs is especially important in light of the recent tendency for
doctors to prescribe cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and high
blood pressure medication to prevent these conditions not just
to treat them. The side effects of these medications are then
treated with more drugs.
Especially since the results of the Women’s Health Initiative
Study in 2002 showed that combined hormone replacement
therapy of pregnant mare’s urine estrogen and synthetic progesterone
was unsafe, millions of women have awoken to the
fact that it may not be in their best interests to do “just what
the doctor ordered.” At the same time, drug companies have
been aggressively targeting the “women’s market” with specific
drugs like Serafem, which is Prozac in a pink package marketed
for PMS. Most clinical trials only enroll men but when the FDA
approves a drug, it’s not restricted to men. Side effects that are
unique to women may surface when it’s too late to pull the drug
from the shelves.
The publication In Her Own Right: The Institute of Medicine’s
Guide to Women’s Health Issues has an overview of gender
differences and their effects on health that is highly relevant.
The following is a creative spin-off on their findings focusing on
why women, even though we live longer, may suffer from more
health complaints than men.
Knowing what it means to be female in a medicalized world
may help you decide to change this pattern and make more
natural choices for your health care.
Women Rule!
How many people realize that we all begin life in the womb as
females! It's absolutely true. In all mammals, the female is the
"default" gender. Then, at a certain precise time in the womb,
the male "Y" chromosome throws a switch that begins the cascade
of events toward maleness for a little less than half the
population.
In the early teens, when male puberty crashes on the scene,
body hair, a larger larynx for a lower voice, broad shoulders and
narrower hips than females are created. The genital structures
for both genders come from the same origins but have different
end points. However, for the most part, males and females are
very much alike in anatomy, physiology, and behavior.
What Man Cannot Conceive of
- The most obvious gender differences are that men cannot get pregnant and suffer symptoms related to pregnancy and women cannot develop prostate disease. But men can and do develop breast cancer.
Women Live Longer
- Women, live an average 6.9 years longer than men. This trend was first noted in 1900 even before cigarette smoking became a big killer of men.
- Women's longevity is seen in all races and under all social conditions.
- Women have this survival advantage from infancy to old age.
- 27 percent more boys than girls die in the first year of life; by age 100, women outnumber men five to one.
- Women make up about 60 percent of the population over age 65 and 75 percent of those over 85.
- The grim reality of disease, disability, and resulting loss of independence actually whittle the "extra seven years of life expectancy...down to three good years and four bad." This statistic can be changed using nutritional medicine.
Women's Immune Systems are Stronger
- Women have a "more responsive immune system. At every age, exposure for exposure, females have better antibody responses." However, our responsive immune systems are becoming more activated against the increasing levels of environmental toxins and yeast toxins from intestinal yeast overgrowth. Avoiding chemical exposures and treating yeast overgrowth will help unburden the immune system.
- Entering the workforce in droves has not led to an increase in the death rate of women in spite of increased stress. It has, however, lead to an increase in chronic fatigue, adrenal exhaustion, obesity, diabetes, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and arthritis all of which have a higher incidence in women than men. The latest trend is to label women with "new diseases" such as polycystic ovarian syndrome to account for the complex of symptoms that women have.
- The increase in smoking in women is now beginning to narrow the survival gap between men and women.
Women and Heart Disease
- Women develop heart disease at a later age when recovery from a heart attack or emergency heart surgery is harder. In fact, they die more often from a heart attack than men. One of the reasons is that women have a greater need for magnesium, which is a crucial heart protector.
- Heart disease has long been considered a man's disease so when a woman develops chest pains she is not investigated to the same extent as a man with chest pains. Therefore, heart disease is not diagnosed early in women when it is easier to treat. Prevention of heart disease in both sexes with a good diet, magnesium, fish oils, and coenzyme Q10 is advisable.
More Doctor Visits
- Women may live longer but statistics imply they are "sicker." Women tally up more sick days, more doctors visits, more hospitalizations, and more drugs than men. Why is this so?
- Women develop a pattern of seeing doctors much more often than men beginning with the need for birth control, having annual Pap smears, pregnancy check ups, and even bringing their children to the doctor. When in the doctor's office, mentioning incidental symptoms and signs become a diagnosis and an opening for medical treatment. Usually a prescription medication.
- "Culturally approved" behavior discourages men from seeing a doctor in the first place or following doctor's orders when they do.
- Women's increased illness is in part due to the fact that more women reach the age when disease is more common.
- "Women don't suffer from unique conditions, they just report more of the same conditions as men."
- Yet, most research on medications is performed on men not women. Then, not until the drug is on the market do we find out the unique side effects they have on women.
Women Take More Prescription Drugs
- Drug treatment itself can lead to more visits for the side effects of prescription drugs. Most doctors don't know how to diagnose drug side effects and often interpret them as the need for more medication.
- Women patients have a more difficult time refusing medications prescribed by their doctors—they don't want the doctor to be mad at them, hurt his feelings, seem non compliant.
- Older women use one-fifth more medication than men. One in every four women aged 65 and over uses twenty-one different medications each year compared to one in every five men.
Gender Specific Diseases
- Three times as many women as men develop rheumatoid arthritis—possibly a manifestation of an extractive immune system mistakenly turning on one's own tissues. Similar figures are seen for other autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, and SjÖgren's syndrome. If a woman also has an overgrowth of intestinal yeast, which is much more common in woman—over 180 different yeast toxins can be absorbed into the blood stream and create an autoimmune response that can adversely affect body tissues.
- Men suffer more hearing loss, possibly because they have been exposed to more industrial noise but women say it’s a ploy to avoid listening to what women have to say!
- Osteoporosis affects 73 percent of women between 65–69 and 89 percent of those over 75. Fluoride in the water supply, high calcium diets, and supplements without the proper balance of magnesium, lack of exercise, and too much protein in the diet all contribute to osteoporosis in the West. All of these causes are preventable.
- An American women faces a risk of life-shortening hip fracture three times greater than a man’s and as great as her combined total risk of breast, uterine, and ovarian cancer or a man’s lifetime risk of prostate cancer.
- Half of hip fracture victims never walk again, many falling prey to such complications of immobility as pressure sores, urinary infections, heart arrhythmias, and pneumonia.
Mood Matters
- Mental disorders affect about the same proportion of each sex but in strikingly disparate patterns.
- A women suffers more obsessive-compulsive, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia, twice the number incidence of phobias, anxiety, panic disorder, major depression and dysthymia (chronic depression), and seven times his risk of somatization disorder, which means your emotions turn into physical symptoms.
- A man has almost twice the incidence of abusing drugs and five times the incidence of abusing alcohol and developing antisocial personality disorder compared to women.
- Males tend to shove their mental distress outside of themselves, to externalize it, through acting out disorders that use violence, crime, chemicals, and alcohol and some other generally risky behavior to transform feeling into behavior. Drugs and alcohol are used to self-medicate.
- Females tend to pull their anguish into themselves, to internalize it in abnormal states of anxiety or mood disorder, for which they are medicated by their doctor.
- Depression affects about 10 percent of women but fewer than 5 percent of men.
- The 10 percent statistic appears in girls around age 10. We don’t know if this means depression is affected by hormones or by society’s perception of a young female as a sexual object.
Lifestyle and Environment Matters
- Women would like to sleep on average 1½ hours more than men do but they are notoriously sleep deprived when they begin having children.
- Girls are vulnerable to twice as much sexual abuse as boys—depression correlates directly with sexual abuse.
- More girls are smoking than ever before, which will change the rates of lung cancer and longevity.
- More girls are drinking than ever before.
- Girls have slower metabolic rates than boys and tend to gain more weight.
- Anorexia and bulimia emerge from the cultural emphasis on thinness and beauty in women and are rarely found in men.
- Women still do most of the house cleaning and are therefore exposed to harsh cleaning chemicals, which can trigger their more active immune system and cause more allergies and autoimmune reactions.
Female Body Versus Male Body
- Women have, on average, 10 percent more body fat than men, which is necessary to make the extra amount of hormones we need for our menstrual cycles.
- At the 100 pound mark, girls start their menstrual cycles. Going under 100 pounds can stop menses. The current epidemic of obesity in children is causing girls to reach puberty sooner than normal.
- Men, compared to women have a larger ratio of muscle mass—3:2 and need to eat more calories because physiologically muscle burns more calories. Even if a woman weighs the same as a man she will have less muscle mass. That’s why increasing muscle mass is important to burn calories and lose weight.
- Women stop growing in their teens but men continue into their early twenties. Men are 6–7 percent taller and have a heavier skeleton containing more calcium by a ratio of 4:3.
- It is still a mystery why menopause speeds up the process of bone loss. There is a period of time called a “bone pause” that is triggered by menopause when more bone is broken down than built up. But that only lasts a year or two then the trend reverses. Strong drugs like Fosamax focus on destroying the cells that break down bone and are taken for life. Fosamax bones may look denser on X-ray but are more brittle and may break more easily. Fosamax is now found to be responsible for deterioration of the jaw bone as part of this brittle bone syndrome. Exercise, diet, and supplements, especially magnesium along with calcium, can prevent and reverse osteoporosis.
The conclusion I came to in researching women’s health statistics
is that they are based on our modern medical system,
which is overdue for a change. Perhaps the current trend to
limit family practitioners, which is giving rise to non-allopathic
practitioners taking over that role, will serve to limit the amount
of medications offered to women and thus increase their health
as well as their longevity. Health and prevention of disease then
become the shared responsibility of the patient and the doctor
with lifestyle interventions heading the list of therapies.
Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor and naturopathic doctor,
wellness consultant, and author of eleven health books,
Dr. Dean is proficient in both conventional and alternative
medicine. She offers private telephone wellness consultations
through her Website at www.carolyndean.com.
References:
- The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine “Research on Paradigm, Practice and Policy.” Sept. 4, 2002.
- Journal of Clinical Oncology, February 15, 2004.
- In Her Own Right: The Institute of Medicine’s Guide to Women’s Health Issues. Beryl Liett Benderly. 1997.
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