TwoX has their daily circlejerk about how medicine is misogynist. Motherfucking CARDIOLOGIST shows up to disprove them - gets downvoted and called a shitlord.

As a medical student and someone who worked in translational medicine for 3 years prior, this really infuriates me from a scientific perspective, a business perspective, and a social perspective. This is nothing more than another stab at winning the oppression Olympics.

So, here's the argument they're making in a nutshell. Women aren't exactly the same as the model organism they use in human clinical trials (in this case, mostly men, but many women are still included), so they're getting the raw end of the deal compared to people who more closely represent the model (men).

This is ignoring the fact that

a) Most clinical trial exclusions of women are in risky phase I/II and it's to protect potential fetuses.

b) Women are less likely to agree to risky procedures and medications than men.

So their solution to this problem is to include more women in clinical trials and then break down the results by gender.

What are the pros and cons?

Pros:

• Women are somewhat more closely represented by the model, so the very occasional instance when these models didn't prove to be representative of women may be avoided.

• Clinical trials theoretically have a larger sample size in general, making the studies more statistically powerful.

Cons:

• Clinical trials will cost more, possibly significantly more depending on the number of patients we need to add. Clinical trials are by far the most expensive part of the drug development process. This will universally raise the cost of healthcare across the country (but that's not an issue right now, right?).

• Due to the increased cost of drug development, many promising drugs will never make it to market.

• In a compromise to avoid the previous scenario, the FDA folds and allows trials to include women with complicating conditions, which throws off results of the testing, leading to drugs that are less safe being on the market.

So basically we're back to square one, when we decided it was worth it to exclude women from clinical trials due to complicating factors, but this time we take the illogical route and include them all anyway because feelz.

The thing is, everything is a model. Until we have truly personalized medicine, everything is based on a model that doesn't perfectly represent you. We can't cater a testing population to every group out there, and if your demographic is more difficult to work with and achieve statistically significant and reliable results, then the models won't be based around you. There are many groups that aren't perfectly represented in many clinical trials, but the trials are ultimately a model, and we use the most reliable model that tells us the most about the drug.

But you know what? Forget it. Let's compromise science, say "fuck you" to statistics, and universally raise the cost of your insurance and all your medications because women want a marginally better model in clinical trials. Well, before we do this, let's ask them if they're okay with paying a significant price hike on their Zoloft and Lexapro for the sake of marginally better data that probably won't help them in any meaningful way. On the other hand, they might not care. After all, it's all covered by the alimony check anyway.

Edit: Wait, I'm not done.

From the article

Well, taking the time to specifically test drugs on women is, like, hard, since women have periods and menopause and stuff.

Yup, let's just brush it off like this is being done for convenience. This author has no idea what she's talking about.

Yet a mere 35% of clinical trial subjects in cardiovascular research are women, and only 31% of those studies break down outcomes by gender.

The only even mildly sensible thing she said here came in the second half of the sentence. We should be breaking down outcomes by gender, however, this is very hard to do. Women represent a diverse population, with pre- and post-menopausal women representing very different populations, and with all women being kind of a grabbag of traits and hormones. So would we actually get statistically meaningful data from those studies that don't break things down? Likely not, and we choose men for the studies so we can achieve that statistical significance with fewer patients. The choice is not between women and men, it's between statistically significant or not, and achieving it with a female population is too costly.

Notably, women experience a 50% higher disease burden from depression than men [...] yet fewer than 45% of animal studies on anxiety and depression use female lab animals, even though these disorders are twice as common in women.

First of all, while depression is more common in women (and that's debatable and a social issue. Many men suffer in silence), men commit suicide at a higher rate, 4x higher. Disregarding all of that, female lab animals. I've never heard something so hilariously misinformed in my life. Even human models for depression and psychological disorders aren't remotely good enough to learn much about the disease. Animal models are all but useless. For all we know, male rats represent the female human brain better than the male human brain. They're so far off that it's not even worth considering.

“It is not easy, and is way more expensive, to include both sexes into research study designs and experiments,”

There we go, the SJW researchers themselves even admit it. It's way more expensive. Likely 2-3x more expensive. You think this country can undergo a 2-3x price hike on drug development costs to get slightly better models for women? This is dangerous thinking people. It's up to true scientists to put down the pitchfork and remember that practicality and scientific integrity should never take second fiddle to feelz.