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Saving Lives: Why Sex and Gender-Specific
Medicine Will Transform Healthcare For Men and
Women Part 1
“We’ve had a unisex vision of
the human genome. Men and women are not equal in
our genome and men and women are not equal in
the face of disease.”—David C. Page,
MD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In September 1965 checked into my room at U.C.
San Francisco Medical School. I had just graduated
with honors from U.C. Santa Barbara and had
received a four-year, full-tuition, fellowship to
study medicine. I had planned to become a
psychiatrist and secretly hoped I would learn why
my father took an overdose of sleeping pills when I
was five years old and why my mother was
preoccupied with death, hers as well as mine.
Though neither my father nor my mother died back
then (they have since passed on), I never lost my
desire to understand men’s and women’s
physical, emotional, and relational illness and
health.
However, medicine at the time was too
restrictive for me. It assumed that the only
differences between males and females had to do
with our genitals and it totally neglected any
psychosocial factors that impacted our health and
wellbeing. I soon dropped out of medical school,
graduated from U.C. Berkeley’s school of
Social Welfare, and began working in the healthcare
field in 1968. I later returned to school and
earned a PhD in International Health.
Following the birth of our first son in 1969 and
our daughter in 1972, I stared MenAlive.com
as my “window to the world” for improving
the health and well-being of men and their
families. I read widely and shared what I was
learning in books and articles. My first book,
Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man was published in
1983. My seventeenth book, Long Live Men! The
Moonshot Mission to Heal Men, Close the Lifespan
Gap, and Offer Hope to Humanity will launch later
this year.
The Emergence of Gender-Specific
Medicine
Marianne J. Legato, M.D. is regarded by both the
medical and scientific communities as one of the
foremost experts on gender differences in the
world. I first became acquainted with Dr. Legato
and her work in 2002 following the publication of
her book, Eve’s Rib: The New Science of
Gender-Specific Medicine and How It Can Save Your
Life. “Until now,” said Dr. Legato,
“we’ve acted as though men
and women were essentially identical except for
the differences in their reproductive
function.”
Research findings and Dr. Legato’s own
experience as a clinician and scientist were
showing that these assumptions were not true.
“In fact, information we’ve
been gathering over the past ten years tells us
that this is anything but true and that
everywhere we look, the two sexes are startingly
and unexpectedly different not only in their
normal function but in the ways they experience
illness.”
Dr. Legato notes that it wasn’t only the
medical and scientific communities that were
challenging the old paradigms, but women were
calling for changes as well.
“It has been women
themselves,” says Dr. Legato, “who
have demanded a change in the way American
scientists and doctors do business. With an
increasingly more coherent and powerful voice,
women have forced the federal government and the
biomedical establishment it supports to define
the differences between males and females.”
There Are 10 Trillion Cells in Human Body and
Every One is Sex Specific
I learned in biology class that all humans have
23 pairs of chromosomes. The first 22 are
identical. The 23rd set are the sex chromosomes. If
we are biologically male, our 23rd pair are XY. If
we are biologically female they are XX. The
scientific assumption until recently was that any
differences between males (XY) and females (XX)
were limited to differences related to our sex
organs.
Another biomedical researcher who has been
working to better understand sex differences is
David Page, M.D. Dr. Page is a biologist and
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT). After Dr. Page won the MacArthur
“Genius Grant” in 1986, he was promoted
to the faculty of the Whitehead Institute and the
MIT Department of Biology in 1988. In 1990, Page
was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Investigator. In 2005 he was named as director of
the Whitehead Institute where he and his colleagues
have been studying the genetic differences between
men and women.
His particular interest and expertise has been
in studying the Y chromosome.
“There are 10 trillion cells in
human body and every one of them is sex
specific,” says Dr. Page.
I first heard about Dr. Page’s research
when I viewed a TED talk called “Why Sex
Matters,” which has now been viewed by more
than 2 million people. He contends that medical
research is overlooking a fundamental fact with the
assumption that male and female cells are equal and
interchangeable in the lab, most notably because
conventional wisdom holds that the X and Y
chromosomes are relevant only within the
reproductive tract.
“It has been said that our genomes
are 99.9% identical from one person to the
next,” says Dr. Page.
“It turns out that this assertion is
correct as long as the two individuals being
compared are both men. It’s also correct if
the two individuals being compared are both
women. However, if you compare the genome of a
man with the genome of a woman, you’ll find
that they are only 98.5% identical. In other
words, the genetic differences between a man and
a woman are 15 times greater than the genetic
difference between two men or between two
women.”
If we think that a 1.5% difference in our
genomes, isn’t a big deal, think again. Dr.
Page says I am as different from my wife
genetically as I am from a male chimpanzee, and so
are all other men. And my wife is as different from
me genetically as she is from a female chimpanzee,
and so are all other women. Being aware of our
differences and similarities are important.
“Men and women are also not equal
in the face of disease,” says Dr. Page.
“For instance, take the case of
rheumatoid arthritis. For every man with
rheumatoid arthritis, there are two to three
women that are affected by this disorder. Is
rheumatoid arthritis a disease of the
reproductive tract? No. Let’s flip the
tables and consider Autism Spectrum Disorders.
For every girl with this disorder there are
about five boys. Let’s look at Lupus, a
long term, autoimmune disorder with devastating
consequences that can result in death. For every
man suffering from Lupus there are six women
suffering from this disorder.”
Dr. Page goes on to say,
“Even when disease occurs in both
men and women with equal frequency, that disease
can have more severe consequences in one sex or
the other.”
We know, for instance, that with the Covid
epidemic, although both men and women could become
infected, men were more likely to require
hospitalization and more men died.
“So, all your cells know on a
molecular level whether they are XX or XY,”
says Dr. Page. “It is true that a great
deal of the research going on today which seeks
to understand the causes and treatments for
disease is failing to account for this most
fundamental difference between men and women.
The study of disease is flawed.”
“We’ve had a unisex vision of the
human genome,” says Dr. Page.
“Men and women are not equal in our
genome and men and women are not equal in the
face of disease.” Dr. Page concludes
saying,
“We need to build a better tool kit for
researchers that is XX and XY informed rather
than our current gender-neutral stance. We need
a tool kit that recognizes the fundamental
difference on a cellular, organ, system, and
person level between XY and XX. I believe that
if we do this, we will arrive at a fundamentally
new paradigm for understanding and treating
human disease.”
The Future of Healthcare:
I believe that gender-specific health care will
transform our world. I will be offering a training
program later this year for healthcare
practitioners who want to improve their skills and
expand their practice. If you are interested in
learning more, please send me an email to Jed@MenAlive.com
and put “Gender-Specific Healthcare” in
the subject line.
©2023 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of seven
books including Male
Menopause, now
translated into 17 foreign languages and his
latest book, The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. For over
38 years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
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