Science podcast: Can gender diversity create better medicine?

Women have always taken medicine but very rarely has this medicine been developed with women’s bodies in mind. This has had serious consequences for women’s health. There’s a movement to change this in many countries including Switzerland. In this episode of ‘The Swiss Connection’ science podcast our healthcare journalist Jessica Davis Plüss investigated why sex and gender have been ignored in drug development and why this is so hard to change. Although women account for 70% of chronic pain patients, 80% of pain studies are conducted only on men or male mice. Men still dominate many clinical trials for diseases that disproportionally affect women. Rarely are study results broken down by sex and gender and reported publicly. When they are, differences in the efficacy and safety for men and women are rarely considered in the approval and prescribing information for drugs. The situation is changing in Switzerland. The country has revised its clinical trials law to ensure more gender ...