3 lies women have been told about their bodies, according to a female doctor

Once, Dr. Elizabeth Comen visited a patient on her deathbed, and the woman apologized for sweating on her.

“I have had countless women apologize to me, feel embarrassed and shame for either expressing normal bodily habits or ... about their bodies themselves,” Comen tells TODAY.com. “These come from the stories we’ve been told, the culture that we live in, and the only way to change that is to unravel what we’ve inherited.” 

This story — which starts off Comen’s book “All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught us about Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today” — highlights a common theme she has seen in her career as a breast oncologist: that women feel discomfort with their bodies.

“So much of what this book is trying to do is unpack that legacy with egregious, horrible stories from the past that are mind-blowing, but true — but also to show how those threads continue today, perhaps in more insidious, subtle, yet equally bad ways,” Comen explains. “(There are) myths that we need to shatter, particularly that somehow women’s bodies are more vulgar or dirtier (and) that we need to be ashamed of our normal bodily function.”

While researching and writing this book, Comen often felt surprised and "horrified" by what she was learning, she recalls.

“We can all recognize ourselves in these women from the past and wonder: Oh my God, if I were anxious in the 1920s, would I have had all my teeth removed?” she says. “If I went to my doctor and said I had a healthy libido, would I be sent to an asylum? Would I have had my uterus removed for stating my political views loudly?” 

Working on the book has made her consider how medical care for women could be done differently now and in the future. 

“What also surprised me was really just how much of this legacy we’ve inherited today and how much we think we’ve moved beyond the past — but it’s not enough,” she says. 

Here are three decadesold (or older) myths about women's bodies that still influence medical care today.

Myth: Women are tiny men 

“One of the biggest myths is that you can just study something in a man and assume that it will apply, just maybe in a lower dose, to women,” Comen says. “Women’s health is head-to-toe different from men. We are not small men. The way we present with diseases can be very different.”

Take heart disease, for example. As recently as 2022, a study found that signs of heart disease look different in women, and that likely contributes to why they're diagnosed later than men, NBC News reported.

“Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women,” Comen says. "(But) we don’t consider that a women’s health issue.”

Thinking of women as tiny men also means that conditions impacting only women tend to receive less attention and funding. “There are so many diseases that we miss along the way,” Comen says.

The medical literature on women still trails behind what’s known about men. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institutes of Health required that women and female animal models be included in clinical trials and earlier research stages, Comen notes.

“Because women are seen as so hormonal and difficult to study, that also translated to mouse models and the types of cells that we used in the laboratory,” Comen says. “It’s not just the drugs and the clinical trials. It’s even before that.”

As a result, women today take medications or use medical devices that have only been studied in men.

“That tells you just how far behind we are in terms of gender parity," she says. "(There are) medications, testing devices … that may be used in women that may have never been adequately studied in women."

Myth: Women have estrogen and progesterone, and men have testosterone 

Medicine has taken a “binary approach” to thinking about hormones, Comen says, driven by the notion that estrogen and progesterone are in women, and testosterone is in men. But the reality is both sexes rely on all three hormones.

Still, stereotypes persist about men's versus women's hormones. Think about how women are often criticized for being emotional due to their hormones.

“Why is it that we malign estrogen and progesterone so much, and testosterone is somehow this glorious hormone that is uniquely found in men and makes everyone virile and strong?” Comen explains. “The way that we think about hormones has extremely limited our understanding of women’s hormonal health.”  

Doctors often feel less confident about giving women hormones as treatments, she says, adding that not enough is understood about "hormones in women, particularly as they age." 

In Comen's experience, many practitioners don't know when to prescribe testosterone to women or hormone therapy in menopause.

“(How) we have guided women about hormone replacement therapy has been a wildly swinging pendulum — from everyone should be on it to no one should be on it," she says. "(We're) just now realizing that there are individual circumstances that are unique to each women (and) carefully thinking about hormone replacement might be appropriate. Those are the kinds of conversations we need to be able to have with our doctors.” 

Myth 3: Women's health is just reproductive health

Medicine has had a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the uterus. In fact, the ancient Greeks believed the uterus moved around women's bodies, causing their health problems. 

“The uterus has been (seen as) the source of all of women’s ills ... wandering around the body, wreaking havoc along the way,” Comen quips. 

For thousands of years, women were frequently diagnosed with a psychological disorder called hysteria, a term that comes from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The diagnosis was not removed from the medical lexicon until the 1980s, decades after doctors learned that the uterus was not the cause of hysteria symptoms.

"This looming specter of the hysterical woman reigns large in our medical legacy," Comen adds.

This focus on the uterus and other reproductive organs in treating women means that oftentimes other health issues are overlooked, especially what happens to women as they age.

Comen says that menopause, cognitive health and heart disease for aging women are especially important topic areas for further research. “I didn’t even know that Alzheimer’s disease was two times more likely to occur in women than men. So, lots of things were missed along the way," she adds.

“We want to make sure that we’re keeping women healthy in all ways (and) that fertility is not the reductionist bottom line of who we are as full and complete women.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com