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My latest in the @nybooks : In medical research, drug regulation, and product design, the male body is too often considered as the default — which can have dangerous, even fatal, consequences for women. /1
https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.law.uconn.edu/articles/2021/02/11/medicine-is-made-for-men/
https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.law.uconn.edu/articles/2021/02/11/medicine-is-made-for-men/
"My research reveals that 32 percent of the large-scale consolidated mass tort lawsuits pending in the federal courts in 2018 involved products that either exclusively or primarily injured women and menstruating and pregnant persons" /2
"27.7 percent of such consolidations involved products that exclusively affected women or menstruating and pregnant persons" /2
"By contrast, only 6.4 percent of the mass torts involved products exclusively affecting men: the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, the male hair-loss drug Propecia, and Adrogel, a testosterone replacement therapy. /3
The difference seems even starker if individual lawsuits are counted rather than the products that allegedly caused the injury . . . /4
. . . only 9,969 federal lawsuits in my dataset involved products that exclusively harmed men. Within the same data, 67,085 federal lawsuits were brought because of pelvic mesh alone." /5
Why the gender gap? Data is a big part of it. Products for women are untested or undertested, and even the causes of the gender disparities I found haven't been studied. But the data there is doesn't look good for women. /6
The @ICIJorg had to partner with Stanford computer scientists to gender disaggregate medical device data. "Of the more than 340,000 incidents in the database whose sex the researchers were able to identify, 67 percent involved women." /7
Science, and law, can do better. /fin
oops, not /fin yet. If the link at the start of this thread doesn't work for you, try this one: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/02/11/medicine-is-made-for-men/
