Specialty: Emergency Medicine
Major Contributions:
Former Director, Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine, Brown University
Editor of Sex and Gender in Acute Care Medicine
Associate Dean of Clinical Faculty Affairs and Development USC School of Medicine Greenville
Professor Department of Emergency Medicine Prisma Health
If you are a woman listening to our podcast, we might have some unsettling news for you – much of the medical science discovered over the past century was only tested on roughly 50% of the population – the male half.
Dr. Alyson McGregor examines how sex and gender differences impact emergency medical care and the overall health of women and she works on communicating these differences to medical professionals and the public. She explained in a 2014 TED Talk that is was decided after World War II that medical testing, including drug trials, would be performed on men and then the findings extrapolated to women as it was assumed women’s bodies reacted the same way as men’s. Which we have learned is not the case as 80% of medications that went to market had to be removed due to the devastating side effects for women.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the medical community challenged this belief and the strides made in understanding the difference between the sexes in terms of anatomy and physiology are staggering.
In 2016 McGregor was an editor of the book Sex and Gender in Acute Medical Care which serves as a guide to clinicians interested in the impact of sex and gender on their practice as well as researchers interested in critical future research directions and the current state of the art techniques in the field.
Four years later she published Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health and What We Can Do About It that looks at not only the disparities in treatment but also gives practical suggestions for improvements.
As a professor of emergency medicine and associate dean of faculty affairs and development at the University of South Carolina Greenville, she is changing the way new doctors are trained regarding sex and gender differences in medical care. In her drive to be an advocate for a change in the medical field she is the co-founder of the national organization Sex and Gender Health Collaborative and serves on the Advisory Council to the Sex and Gender Health Education Summit series.
Written by Angela Goad
Sources:
USC Greenville: Alyson McGregor
TED: Why medicine often has dangerous side effects for women
See Also:
Advancing sex and gender competency in medicine: sex & gender women’s health collaborative