The MALE bias

Historically, medical studies were mainly done on male mice and on men; and then extrapolated to treat women, as if a female body were just a smaller version of a male one. Here’s why that doesn’t make sense, and how to work with your body’s natural rhythm for better health.

- LIESL ROBERTSON

As a medical doctor practicing in the UK, Dr Hazel Wallace started noticing that women were not given the same consideration and treatment when it came to health and healthcare. Yes, we are living longer, she says, ‘but with poorer health and so I really wanted to understand why this was. I was noticing little biases in how we treat male and female patients in the hospital as well, so I stepped into the research and just opened this minefield of how much disparity there is in healthcare.’

Dr Wallace is also a qualified nutritionist, a personal trainer, a best-selling author (with three nutrition-related books to her name), and the founder of The Food Medic, a website and podcast dedicated to all things health, fitness and nutrition.

Medical research

‘Most of the medical research we have is based on a male body,’ says Dr Wallace in an episode of the ZOE Science & Nutrition podcast. ‘It’s only been the last decade, or maybe the last two decades, that there’s been a huge drive to include females in medical studies because we’ve previously assumed that women are just “smaller men” and therefore we can just extrapolate all this data onto women.’

That is very much not the case, she says. ‘We’re very different from a hormone profile point of view [and] this also changes our physiology, our metabolism, even our anatomy – so it’s really important that we take that into consideration.’