title: [Sex and gender in medicine].
abstract: Gender specific medicine is a part of gender-research, which has been insufficiently considered up to the present in medicine, sanitation and politics. Part of the scientific medicine simply ignores the knowledge that men and women are different in feeling, thinking and social acting without any question. Doctors often incline to treat all their patients as if there was just one gender: i.e. the male one. It is without dispute that men and women vastly suffer from the same diseases, but they often go through them quite differently. The female body seems to work differently from the male one in nearly all respects--starting with the brain, going on with the heart, cardiovascular, lungs, stomach and intestines and ending up with the skin and immune order. Identical cases of illnesses bring about different symptoms on both sides. Therapeutics therefore have to be appropriate for the specific gender. This however demands complete thinking in preventive measures, therapy, development of one's education and research. Exactly for this reason the new "gender-model" is absolutely important and necessary in medicine as a new pattern of thinking. Only in this way one can realize a comprehensive revaluation of health and disease of both sexes. Pre-eminently one has to convince people that the embedding of "gender" both in medicine and the surrounding area is much more useful than costly from the scientific, political and individual point oft view.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Anthropologie der Universität Mainz.
authors.forename: Kurt W
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Alt
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Strohmenger
authors.forename: Ingelore
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Welpe
mesh_terms: D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008511:Medicine / Q000379:methods*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians'; D011315:Preventive Medicine / Q000379:methods*; D012737:Sex Factors