In their public pledges to tackle chronic disease in the United States, federal health leaders have made few mentions of women’s health. As a clinician who has spent a career focused on how science can better serve women, I have found this lack of attention unsurprising. Reference to the female reproductive tract still too often provokes discomfort among decision-makers, leading women’s health to be deprioritized, then ultimately neglected. Within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), despite decades of policy to advance the topic, research specific to the health needs of women has remained an afterthought. Support for women’s health research from the NIH, consistently less than 10% of the overall budget, has been declining.1
[JAMA]
For the NIH to continue to overlook women’s health, when a primary goal of the “MAHA” movement is to end rising rates of chronic disease, would be a tragic missed opportunity. Women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with a chronic illness or multimorbidity—the coexistence of 2 or more unrelated chronic diseases. Women also uniquely experience chronic gynecologic disorders that have historically been dismissed as a niche concern by the biomedical community.2
Women’s health was at one time considered a crucial component of medicine. In 1893, when the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was founded as the model for modern medical education, gynecology was 1 of 4 original pillars.3 Alongside medicine, surgery, and pathology, the field was delineated as essential for a complete understanding of the human body. While other specialties subdivided and grew increasingly subspecialized, the scope of gynecology broadened. Its first merger was with obstetrics, and the second was with primary care for women. The ostensible goal was comprehensive care for women. But within the persistently male-dominated world of medicine, gynecology has been diluted, siloed, and diminished in stature.4
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