CODA

 

 

Even though this book is filled with hundreds of facts about the differences between men and women, it is only a beginning. In five years I’ll have to write another one, infinitely more sophisticated and replete with the answers to questions we’ve only begun to formulate.

In a very real sense, the new gender-specific science is a gift of women to the whole human family. It is women, after all, who challenged the scientific establishment’s policy of doing research only on men, who reminded it that their own experience of their bodies was different from what scientists believed it to be, and who pointed out that when doctors assumed that they could treat women as though they were merely small men, they made a tremendous intellectual gaffe.

Using gender as a unique prism through which to view and better understand normal human function and the experience of disease is one of the most important new ideas in medicine. Everywhere researchers look for differences between men and women, they find them. And every time they find a new one, it prompts questions they never would otherwise have even thought to ask. The new knowledge about women is forcing a correction and expansion of male models of normal human function and the workings of illness to impair and destroy it. Inevitably, doctors will use the new knowledge to revise their ideas of how to prevent and to cure disease. The current emphasis on women’s health, which often—regrettably—does not include a comparison of information about females and males, will morph into a newer, broader discipline: that of gender-specific medicine. No certifying examinations will qualify a doctor as a “specialist in women’s health”; rather, doctors will all be trained in the unique features of both men’s and women’s biology and in the ways sex modifies the signs and symptoms of illness. All doctors will be gender-specific doctors, who treat men and women more accurately and more effectively, and who above all are more cognizant of the complexity of what it means to be a male or a female.

Wanting to learn more about women and contrast it to our knowledge of men is not a matter of political correctness or a product of feminist angst. It is an intellectual imperative. Correctly used, the natural experiment of biological sex is one of the most powerful tools we have been given to help us understand the human condition. Eve’s apple, as I read the old tale, was the ultimate prize that Paradise had to offer.