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Comment by 9q | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any citation for that? I'm pretty sure doctors are trained to look after different races and both genders. Looking after women's specific biology is its own entire field.

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It's a real thing. Freakonomics talked about it in one of their recent podcasts. Basically, clinical trials often exclude or under sample women for a number of reasons including the confounding factors of menstrual cycles, pregnancy complications, etc. This has received increasing attention lately and is getting better, but a ton of the current scientific wisdom is based on underrepresentative samples.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bad-medicine-part-2-drug-tri...

I can understand it for drug trials. If men are more "homogeneous" and don't create additional parameters with which you have to consider, then for trialing it would make sense.

Race wouldn't really play a part here I don't think unless a medicine happened to effect a race differently (e.g. African people often have sickle-cell anemia, so you do have to consider race sometimes as well).

But the user above actually said something differently, in that people are treated differently. Like I said, doctors are trained to treat everybody regardless of race/ gender. Clinical trials based on variables of participants, and the general treatment of individuals is completely different.

I'm talking about how it works in practice. Ask someone in one of the targeted groups what it's like with getting their problems taken seriously.

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