The legacy of bias: Building the foundation for sex and gender-based medicine

The legacy of bias: Building the foundation for sex and gender-based medicine Alyson J. McGregor, Associate Dean at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, highlights the historical bias present in medical research; the exclusion of which has created a significant knowledge gap that impacts the diagnosis and treatment of various health conditions. Modern medicine is built on the promise of objectivity – a discipline grounded in evidence, reproducibility, and the pursuit of universal truth. Yet the history of that evidence reveals a fundamental flaw: for much of the 20th century, the ‘universal’ patient in research was male.