Although in advance, it is normal to think that there are not inequalities, the truth is that the answer to that question is affirmative: there are gender inequalities in public health and in the studies about pain. A truth that has been confirmed by our colleague Helena de Sola who participated in the Conference of Public Health for an equal world last October 6 in the Faculty of Nursing and Physiotherapy of the University of Cádiz.
The conference was opened in a masterful way by the endocrinologist Carme Valls Llobet, director of the Woman, Health and Quality of Life Program of Barcelona. The goal of the meeting was to promote gender analysis in medical, pharmacological and nursing research and practice as Dr. Valls highlighted after inviting those attendees to think about sexism in medical practice.
The round table where our colleague Helena de Sola participated, went in depth in this reality. Besides addressing determinants of genre inequalities in health, de Sola focussed on the gender differences in pain giving also a social perspective of them.
Taking as a starting point that we live under a patriarchal system, the doctor captured attendees’ attention from the beginning. During the talk, she used a lot of interesting examples to evidence the sexism that exists over the different fields of medicine. One of the most prominent facs? The underrepresentation of women in clinical trials of cardiology.
Thanks to the contributions of several professionals from the health field as Antonio Escolar or Jesús Cayuso, the event became an interesting discussion about the implications that gender inequalities had on health and it also became a place to lay the foundations to improve in mid-term.
In conclusion, it was a very profitable conference that gave visibility to a real problem that affects areas as relevant as health.
