21/05/2026
The vast majority of my patients are women for several reasons. The main one is that Traditional Chinese Medicine provides solutions where western medicine has chronically failed 51% of the population. Women come to me after years of being told, "This is just how periods are," "This is just what aging is like for women," or ,"This sounds like anxiety."
When male pattern baldness has 3 x the medical research funding that endometriosis does, you know you're in a field that functions in inhumane and discriminatory ways. Male pattern baldness poses no risk, is accompanied by no pain, and is not, in fact, a medical condition. Meanwhile endometriosis behaves similarly to cancer and can completely destroy a woman's life. The pain is excruciating and diagnosis is often missed for an entire decade due to lack of research, knowledge and training. Additionally doctors tend to treat women's pain less seriously than they do men's.
Working with women's health is extremely gratifying, and my patients often experience relief and answers for the first time in their lives. Acupuncture and herbs can regulate menopausal body temperature, end menstrual pain, and regulate heart rate.
DM me for a session.
In 1990, a landmark federal study on heart attacks tested 22,141 patients. The unwritten rule for women in medical research was absolute exclusion.
Not a single patient in the trial was female.
The study was designed to answer a simple, critical question: Could a daily aspirin prevent a fatal heart attack? It was funded by the United States government. It took years to complete. The findings dictated how doctors across the country treated their patients.
The data was clean. The results were clear. And every single data point belonged to a man.
In Washington D.C., Representative Olympia Snowe looked at the numbers. She was a Republican from Maine, sitting on the committees that authorized federal spending. She started looking for other studies. She asked for the historical data on how common diseases affected the female body.
The files were effectively empty.
The aspirin study was not an anomaly. It was standard operating procedure.
When a patient went to a physician for a prescription in 1990, the doctor checked the Physician’s Desk Reference. The dosages listed on those pages were treated as absolute medical gospel. Neither the patient nor the doctor knew that the drug had likely never been tested on a female body.
The federal government was also running the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. It began in 1958. It was the largest and longest-running project of its kind, tracking how the human body broke down over time. It informed Medicare policy and geriatric care for the entire nation.
It tracked over a thousand men. It completely excluded the half of the population that lived the longest.
Snowe recognized the shape of the problem. It wasn’t an oversight. It was an architecture.
Alongside Representative Pat Schroeder and the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, Snowe requested a formal government audit. They bypassed the medical establishment entirely and went straight to the Government Accountability Office.
They asked for a comprehensive accounting of how the nation's premier health agency was spending its research budget. The investigators spent months pulling funding records, trial protocols, and demographic data.
The report arrived in June 1990.
The numbers were absolute. The blind spot was intentional. The government was spending billions of taxpayer dollars to discover treatments for diseases that killed both men and women. They were testing those treatments almost exclusively on men.
At the time, a 1977 federal guideline explicitly banned women of "childbearing potential" from early-stage clinical trials. The stated intent was to protect potential fetuses from experimental drugs in the wake of the Thalidomide tragedy. In practice, it meant the medical establishment treated the male body as the biological default. Female physiology was classified as a complicating variable. A woman's hormone cycle made data "messy" and more expensive to track, so researchers simply eliminated women from the math entirely.
The National Institutes of Health defended the practice calmly.
They cited the 1977 protocol. They cited cost efficiency. They cited the difficulty of controlling biological variables.
The human cost of that efficiency was staggering.
Women were dying of heart attacks in emergency rooms because their symptoms did not match the textbooks. Male heart attacks presented as crushing chest pain. Female heart attacks often presented as profound fatigue, nausea, or back pain. Doctors, trained strictly on male data, sent them home with antacids.
Women were experiencing severe, sometimes fatal side effects from prescription medications. The standard dosages had been calculated for the metabolism, weight, and liver function of an average-sized man.
The system wasn't broken. It was working exactly as it was designed to work.
Snowe understood how Washington operated. You do not change an entrenched bureaucracy by asking for a favor. You change it by targeting its survival.
The NIH is not a private lab. It is a federal agency. Every dollar it spends is authorized by Congress. In 1990, the agency’s budget was up for reauthorization.
Snowe and her colleagues decided to block the money.
The NIH was a monolith.
Billions in annual funding.
Thousands of researchers.
The undisputed global authority on human health.
A system that answered to almost no one.
Snowe drafted new statutory language.
She didn't write a recommendation. She didn't suggest a new set of voluntary guidelines. She wrote a federal mandate.
The legislation required the inclusion of women and minorities in all federally funded clinical research. It went further. It required researchers to analyze the data by s*x and race to prove whether treatments worked differently on different bodies.
If a researcher refused, they would not get a dime of federal money.
The resistance from the medical community was immediate and loud. Administrators complained about the financial burden. Expanding trial sizes to include a statistically significant number of women would cost millions of dollars. They complained about the timeline. Restructuring the trials would slow down scientific progress.
During one briefing, Snowe and Schroeder pressed an agency official on why the landmark aging study excluded women entirely.
The official stated flatly that female hormonal fluctuations made women too difficult to study. They were too complex for the paperwork. If they really needed female data, he suggested, they could just study rats and adjust the hormones.
Snowe did not flinch.
She and the women’s caucus held the reauthorization bill hostage. They called public hearings. They laid the GAO audit on the table for the press to see. They dragged the director of the NIH before Congress to explain why male doctors were the only baseline for human health.
They stopped asking for scientific inclusion and started holding the budget hostage.
The strategy was absolute. If the agency wanted its billions, it had to change its science.
The NIH Revitalization Act passed into law in 1993.
It was a strict statutory mandate. The agency could no longer legally fund clinical trials that excluded women without specific, compelling justification.
The data shifted almost immediately. Medical textbooks were rewritten. Heart disease presentation in women was finally categorized correctly, changing emergency room protocols across the country.
The law has been on the books for thirty years. The federal mandate is absolute. But the pharmaceutical industry still grapples with the decades of missing data. Dosages for some modern sleep aids and pain medications are still being adjusted today, decades late, because the original baselines were drawn entirely from men.
Olympia Snowe: the woman who forced medicine to see half the world.
Source: Government Accountability Office (GAO) Archives; Congressional Record.
Verified via: The National Institutes of Health, Journal of Women's Health.
(Some details summarized for brevity.)
