Gendered medicine is the central theme in an emerging international movement where gender is taken to be central to all aspects of medicine.

Those who espouse the discipline of gendered medicine take gender as a key aspect of all medical knowledge. This includes teaching, learning and professional development for medical students, postgraduate medical training, and of medical educators and teachers themselves. To improve the quality of medical education, gender and sex differences in medical knowledge, and in making clinical judgements in accord, must count as core curriculum, and gender considered at all levels of educational policy making including educational leadership in the medical profession.

A simple example of gendered medicine is that one third of traumatic hyphaemas in some case series internationally consist of women who have experienced domestic violence. Another is where an outbreak of endophthalmitis due to fungal contamination of intra-operative irrigation fluids in India affects more women than men where women have a higher prevalence of cataract and are more likely than men to request cataract surgery. Another is hydroxychloroquine ocular toxicity which is dose dependent, yet where women's weight - say 45Kg (not your average 70Kg man) might not be taken into close consideration during a number of years of exposure to the drug. Click here for more resources click here.

- Associate Professor Deborah Colville

Two Books on Teaching Gender and gendered medicine: