Imagine seeing four doctors in three years and leaving every appointment with the same answer: your labs look “fine,” you’re probably just stressed, get more sleep. It wasn’t until she collapsed at work that anyone ordered the right test. She was 44. Her heart disease had been progressing for years, hiding in plain sight because her symptoms didn’t match the textbook. While this story is fictional, the pattern is not. It reflects the documented experiences of thousands of women across the United States and around the world whose symptoms are overlooked, dismissed, or misdiagnosed.
Boston University’s newly published Women and Health study captures the scale of that pattern in a single, striking statistic: women in the U.S. live an average of five years longer than men, yet spend 25% more of their lives in poor health. Women are living longer than ever. But more years mean little if too many of them are spent in poor health. Longevity is not the finish line. A health system that stops at survival has not finished its job. Women deserve to thrive, not just endure.
For decades, American medicine was built on a foundational assumption: that women’s bodies functioned essentially as men’s, with a few reproductive exceptions. Clinical trials typically excluded women. Drug dosages were calibrated to male physiology. Diagnostic criteria were drawn from data on male patients. This wasn’t born of malice but of incomplete science. Those research gaps shaped the treatments, protocols, and medical education that followed. Today we know better. Our responsibility is to practice medicine accordingly.
Misdiagnosis is where that failure becomes most personal. Women are 50% more likely than men to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack, their symptoms are frequently attributed to anxiety or stress rather than cardiac events. Nearly 80% of autoimmune disease patients are women, yet many wait years for a diagnosis. Women with endometriosis often wait nearly seven years for answers. Women deserve a health system that takes their pain seriously, pursues answers relentlessly, and does not stop at survival. That is not a radical ask; it is the definition of good medicine.
The answer demands more than creating a separate lane for women’s health. A stand-alone specialty is necessary, but insufficient on its own. If women’s health exists only as its own field, we risk building yet another silo, concentrating responsibility on a smaller community of specialists while leaving every other practitioner uninformed. The cardiologist, the neurologist, the pharmacist, the first-year medical student, all of them need to understand that a woman’s biology is not a footnote to her care. It is the foundation of it.
Women’s health principles must be embedded into every field of medicine, every research protocol, every pharmaceutical standard, and every policy framework. At the same time, women’s health should stand as its own coherent discipline, one that sees women fully across every stage of life: physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
These are not competing ideas but complementary ones. They are two sides of the same necessary shift: universal fluency in women’s health, supported by a field dedicated to advancing it.
The costs of the status quo extend far beyond individual suffering. Women who spend decades managing undertreated illness are less able to participate in the workforce, caregiving, and community life. This is a public health crisis. The question is no longer whether to act. It is how. That means requiring research to track how diseases affect women differently. It means training doctors and pharmacists to recognize those differences in the exam room. It means funding the problem at the scale it deserves. And it means making sure that knowledge reaches every professional who cares for women, not just those who specialize in it.
THE REAL BACK-TO-SCHOOL VACCINE QUESTION ISN’T ABOUT SCIENCE — IT’S ABOUT CONTROL
Nationwide and around the world, researchers, clinicians, and policymakers are already working to transform how women are studied and cared for. That momentum is encouraging, but it is not enough. Policymakers must prioritize funding for sex-specific research. Health systems must redesign care models around the whole woman. That’s what is required for women’s optimal health. And all of us, physicians, advocates, patients, and families, must hold ourselves to a higher standard than simply helping women live longer.
The measure of our healthcare system should not simply be how long women live, but how well they live.
Valerie Huber, M. Ed is president and CEO of The Institute for Women’s Health, and Victoria Akyea, MPH, is a doctoral candidate, public health professional, and special assistant to the president at The Institute for Women’s Health.