” It’s a woman. Either way, it’s beyond us. » German professor and cardiologist Vera Regitz-Zagrosek recalls here the reaction, in the 1980s, of a senior doctor faced with a patient suffering from acute heart failure whose origin his team could not find. “And this woman, who was under 50, ultimately died. »
A decisive case in the life of this practitioner who today teaches gender medicine in Zurich, Switzerland, a unique chair in Europe. “Each cell in a woman has a metabolism, receptors and genes that differ from a cell in a man,” she recalls. Men and women therefore have different biographies, which implies clinical manifestations of the disease and care that must be adapted.
Ursula Duplantier’s documentary takes stock of what continues to be neglected by a medicine whose standards and norms have been established and practiced from men and by men – thus multiplying health inequalities. The director followed and collected the stories of four patients, in France and Germany. It thus embraces a variety of pathologies, circumstances and medical reflexes.
To reach the same conclusions each time: if men and women are different from a hormonal, genetic and physiological point of view, it is not this biological reality – still too little known due to a lack of research and clinical trials on women – which presides over diagnosis and quality of care, but very often gender stereotypes.
Frozen heritage
More often kept at a distance, the words of women more readily lead to psychosomatic treatment, when physical causes are more directly sought in a man. The frozen heritage – like the ancient marble statues used to illustrate the point – of a medicine centered on the study of the male body, of which the female body would ultimately be only a reduced model, and of which the majority of practitioners still remain men, particularly in key positions of head of department at the hospital, crucial in “the definition and transmission of medical standards”.
Cardiovascular diseases remain an emblematic example: in France, they constitute the leading cause of death among women but remain poorly diagnosed and poorly managed. Obstacles that are determined to overcome by a cardiologist like Claire Mounier-Véhier, professor at the CHRU of Lille and co-founder of the association Agir pour le coeur des femmes, or Vera Regitz-Zagrosek, pioneer of studies which have highlighted the role played by sex in cardiovascular diseases.
