21/09/2025
Hysteria. That was the catch-all diagnosis for women for centuries.
Anxiety? Hysteria. Pain? Hysteria. Even fainting or fatigue, labeled as the womb “wandering” around the body. It wasn’t medicine, it was dismissal.
That mindset never really left. Until 1993, women weren’t even required in clinical trials. Most drugs were tested on men (sometimes even rats) and the results were simply applied to women.
And we’re still paying the price. Women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack. 1 in 10 lives with endometriosis, yet it takes years to get diagnosed. Autoimmune diseases overwhelmingly affect women, but funding still leans toward male-focused conditions.
In India, it’s worse: there isn’t even proper national data on endometriosis, and femtech funding has fallen from $70M to just $2M this year.
This isn’t because women’s bodies are “too complicated.” It’s because they were treated as too inconvenient to study.
Science can do better. Women deserve better.