AS a medical doctor practising 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.’
Historically, women were excluded from clinical trials for three main reasons: one, because of their fluctuating hormones, which are a hassle to keep track of; two, because the women in the trial might fall pregnant, which poses ethical risks; and three, since women have traditionally been primary caregivers, it’s too much of a disruption to get them involved in stringent, time-consuming trials.
The term ‘women’s health’ typically just refers to reproductive and gynaecological health. ‘We have historically been reduced to just that – just our ability to conceive,’ Dr Wallace says. But those fluctuating hormones, considered merely a ‘nuisance’ when conducting a research trial,
