Gender medicine is fighting to go mainstream, but funding gaps and political pushback are making it very hard. This isn’t stopping a pioneering group of doctors in Switzerland. When Carolin Lerchenmüller became the first full professor of gender medicine in Switzerland last year, she told Swissinfo that she didn’t want to be a mascot. Her goal was to establish gender medicine as a “full-fledged academic discipline”. The German cardiologist at the University of Zurich echoed those sentiments on Monday at the first Swiss Gender Medicine Symposium in Bern. “When you start, it is about having pioneers,” said Lerchenmüller. “But to survive, gender medicine can’t be associated with individual people. It needs to be institutionalised.” What is sex and gender medicine? Gender medicine is a new field that acknowledges that health and disease are affected by sex and gender, and that aims to integrate the biological and sociocultural aspects into research, medical practice, and education. Sex ...
