“Gender medicine”: a new book by Marek Glezerman

Gender Medicine is not a new specialty but an unfortunately neglected dimension of medicine. The development of medicine in the last 50 years has focused its attention mainly on a single sex (animal models) or gender (human beings) and transferred data to the other uncritically.

Gender medicine encompasses the entire life path of humans from conception until old age through the different life trajectories of men and women.

For the first time, Marek Glezerman has written a book on Gender Medicine where human life is approached as a whole. This book is absolutely unique because a restrictive way of considering Gender Medicine underlies all books published to date in the world.

As the first Chairperson of Gender-specific Medicine in Italy, I consider this book to be very important for teaching students because for the first time it is possible to find a comprehensive approach to:

– intrauterine life where gender differences are very important and have a great influence on the physical and psychological development of the fetus and of future men or women;

– an accurate presentation of reproductive system and fertility problems in both sexes;

– considerations about different types of pain, temperature regulation, and the fundamental focus on the second brain of our body: the gut, where microbiota also has an important gender-specific immunological function;

– doctor-patient relationships which vary in the different gender composition of the two actors;

– very common heart and digestive tract diseases that have so many differences in symptoms, prevention and therapy strategies, complications, and sides effects of drugs

The theory about the loss of men is very interesting! But I wouldn’t worry too much about men being the weaker sex and an “endangered species.” Men are still a great support of the world and their life expectancy is growing since they are learning to do prevention. The disappearance of the Y chromosome in a few hundred thousand years? The disappearance of humankind, the end of the world! This regards both genders and needs research!

Therefore, this book gives a great impulse to the medical community, stressing that gender medicine is not a niche for aficionados, but a necessary revolution whose wind will have to blow through all medical specialties. For this reason, nowadays we prefer speaking about gender-specific medicine because the gender dimension should permeate medical culture as a whole and be pervasive in all surgical and medical specialities, as well as in all healthcare professions.

Giovannella Baggio

Full Professor, University of Padua

Chair of Gender Medicine

Chief of Internal Medicine Unit

University Hospital

Padua – Italy