Eve's Rib

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Women and men should not be treated as equals, says this Columbia University professor of medicine, when it comes to matters medical. In a new book, she argues that traditional disease diagnosis and treatment, which have been based on studies of men, can't be applied unchanged to women.

Hormones, for example, profoundly affect how men and women metabolize medication. So epileptic and asthmatic women often have attacks before their periods. Drug dosages should be adjusted accordingly.

Men and women with the same condition may also exhibit different symptoms. During a heart attack, men usually feel pain in the chest or left arm, but 20% of women have pain in the upper abdomen or back, shortness of breath, nausea and sweating.

And because women are more sensitive to the carcinogens in cigarettes, a woman who smokes the same amount as a man has a 20% to 70% higher risk of developing lung cancer. To compound that, women's tumors tend to appear on the lungs' periphery, so their cancer is often caught later.

Even some basic bodily responses are different. Men often react to pain with a rise in blood pressure, but women may experience a rise in heart rate — and sometimes even a blood-pressure drop. Yet after surgery, doctors often gauge levels of pain by blood pressure, not heart rate.