Pink Pills and Blue Pills

[differenceblog]

Lidia Wasowicz, in a report on non-drug depression treatments for United Press International, quotes Jill Becker's complaint about many depression drug trials: In fact, most drug trials are designed to include both men and women, but do not include a large enough number of subjects to determine if there are differences between males and females in

Comments

[beaconeer]

Fascinating. They already are well aware that hormone levels affect the onset of illnesses such as depression, why not also study the interaction between the hormones and the treatments of these illnesses? Id like to see what they find when the subject has better coverage. Interesting. Thanks for posting.

[snickers1127]

It still surprises me that it's taken this long to realize that women can't always be treated as "little men" when it comes to drug studies. Including more women in clinical trials was certainly a solid step forward, and this appears to be the next logical step. Yes, women are likely interpreting their symptoms differently than men, and that should also be taken into account, but the fact remains that men and women ARE different, which can lead to different reactions to drug treatment. With the FDA approval of a race-specific drug, you would think that ppl would be more open to gender-specific therapy in general. After all, that is a much broader category, and much less controversial (from my POV, at least).

Too bad society continues to have trouble with the concept that "different does not equal/mean better." If that was not an issue, I'm sure this would be much less difficult to have accepted. I hope this is an area that will continue to be explored, and maybe change will occur someday.