Research on Female Brain & Body

The national plea for equality has made me think about equality in a new way. Recently, I had a bad reaction to a medication. My nephew, in graduate school, did some research and discovered that it had only been tested on males—so how it would impact females was unknown. I think that is inequality for women regardless of their skin tones. What do you know about this? Equality needs to be recognized for all races and skin tones—AND I think it is a much larger problem than that . . . Please comment.

It has been traditional to use male subjects (whether mouse, rat, monkey, or human) because, as one male researcher told me, the fluctuations of hormones in a female would clutter up the conclusions. I responded by saying that this was precisely the reason females need to be used as research subjects at least equally with males (by later adulthood females tend to outnumber males). How do medications and treatments impact a female with her fluctuations of hormones, as he put it? Very differently if anecdotal reports are representative. More tomorrow.