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This Week in the War on Women, August 11-17, 2019: Medical Edition

I had surgery last night, so the failures of Medicine are on my mind. Specifically, I’m having vocal cord repair because Anesthesia nicked them and caused scarring. My ENT last week told me to tell Anesthesia to use a smaller airway tube and to be careful. Shouldn’t that be obvious? Does anyone want to spend their lives sounding like a hoarse duck? So I wondered whether this is a male/female thing. And of course it is. From the journal Anaesthesia:  

Postoperative "minor" complications: Comparison between men and women 

Overall, women were almost twice as likely to report any postoperative complication (RR = 1.92,p < 0.0005). Specifically, they were 2.6 times more likely to report nausea and vomiting (p < 0.0005), 1.5 times more likely to report sore throat (p = 0.0001), 2.3 times more likely to report headache (p < 0.0005) and 2.4 times more likely to report backache (p = 0.0036).

I have had nearly all of these symptoms pretty much every time! No vomiting, and the other symptoms wear off in a few days. But why would they be so much more common in women?

From Pharmacy Practice:

Women's involvement in clinical trials: Historical perspective and future implications 

Pharmacodynamic differences between the sexes have been observed for particular drugs. For example, women are at increased risk of experiencing torsades de points, a potentially fatal arrhythmia, after taking drugs which prolong the QT interval.6,7 In addition, acute liver failure as a result of certain drug exposures has also been reported in women more often than in men.6

So probably a woman’s body doesn’t respond the same and they haven’t adequately studied aftereffects of anesthesia in women. I hope they’re not destroying my liver!

Interestingly, they gave me morphine for pain last time I was in the hospital after long and complicated surgery, the morphine didn’t affect me at all, and it took more than 24 hours before I could convince them to give me something different, during which the nurses accused me of being a “drug seeker” (that’s right, I expected pain control immediately after surgery, my bad!). Now I find this (and I include it because I know I’m far from the only inadequately treated pain patient):

Women experience more pain and require more morphine than men to achieve a similar degree of analgesia 

Maybe I’ll mail a copy to the hospital. 

In good news for women, just published in Medical News Today, is The Power of Electromagnetic Energy on Breast Cancer Cells :  Researchers used a Helmholtz coil to apply energy to a variety of breast cancer cells: 

Certain cell types that would typically spread by forming "long, thin extensions at the edge" were unable to do so when hit by a low intensity electromagnetic field.

-snip-

More significantly, the team found that metastatic triple-negative breast cancer cells, which are the most challenging cells to treat, were the most responsive to electromagnetic fields.

The results are still very preliminary, only being shown so far to work on cells in the lab, needing successful repetition in animal and then human studies. But it is a very promising line of attack: It stops the spread of currently poorly treatable metastatic cancer, and it would be noninvasive, possibly with no side effects for patients. 


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