The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine
We know the difference
The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine
We know the difference
“Closing the gap would give the 3.9 billion women in the world today an extra seven healthy days a year, or an average of 500 days over a lifetime.” Sheila Uria Veliz and Mehek Bapna are not related, at least not by blood, but they share something similar. Both young women had their teenage years upended by debilitating illnesses that took years to diagnose.
Nothing is more evident in clinical medicine than the complex and interactive relationship between human biology and the environment in which individuals find themselves.
“Everything flows, nothing stands still. Nothing endures but change.” -Heraclitus
As Heraclitus pointed out, everything in the world inexorably changes over time. Medical science and medical perspectives are no exceptions.
Have certain evolutionary processes shaped the development of our brains and what they desire?
Women want relationships, while men do not.
Ask a layperson what biologically differentiates males and females, and at least two different answers will undoubtedly emerge: gonads and hormones. Indeed, the fact that males have testes and females have ovaries leads to a lifelong sexually dimorphic hormonal profile, especially in testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone levels. These sex hormones exert both permanent and protein modification.
If Leptin regulates overall body mass, what factors are responsible for women’s and men’s different body shapes? Classically, women look like pears and men like apples.
Women’s lungs are smaller than those of men. Before you say “I knew it,” I want to tell you something surprising: the lungs are smaller in women even when we adjust for smaller size of women’s bodies. Furthermore, women have lower levels of hemoglobin, the molecule in the blood that carries oxygen to tissues. Lower hemoglobin levels might seem to require larger lung volume, to compensate for the reduced amount of oxygen circulating through the lungs. But women’s lungs are smaller, not larger and we don’t know why.
Perhaps no question sparks more controversy than whether children assume sex roles as a result of their biology or the socialization they’re exposed to. The answer, of course, is probably not an “either/or” but a “with” – some combination of the socialization we receive interacts with our natural biology (itself a knot of complicated and intertwining factors) to turn us into the people we become.
We’ve discussed the greater ease with which women interpret non-verbal cues, so it won’t come as a surprise that women use more of them to communicate as well. Women tend to use facial expressions, verbal rhythm and tone, and physical gestures to convey information and emotion.
The end of a romantic relationship is truly agonizing. I remember feeling furious as I imagined the cad who might one day break my daughter’s heart. At the time, my husband consoled me by pointing out that she was five years old and safe—at least for a while.