A new center specializing in women’s health will open its doors in Sion. This type of offer is on the rise, and fills a gap, while fulfilling undeniable marketing criteria.
It is the Affidea Care Group that will open this skills center available to doctors in Sion and the surrounding area.
Affidea
An imaging center entirely dedicated to women will open in Sion this year: this announcement from the Affidea care network will certainly delight women wishing to take care of their health with specialized professionals, “in a protected environment”. Such centers are rare and relatively new: there is one in Lausanne, where patients come from afar for breast X-rays or gynecological or pelvic analyses.
“These specific centers are therefore welcome, but we must not forget the important marketing component behind them, analyzes Joelle Schwarz, co-head of the health and gender unit at Unisanté. Breast imaging is offered in many other places, and if single sex may be more comfortable, it does not necessarily bring benefits in terms of expertise, while one might fear that it would lead to exclusion of trans or non-binary people.”
Historically, women’s health centers correspond more to a protest political current, when for example the feminist movements of the 1960s protested against the medicalization of gynecological care with predominantly male caregivers, explains the researcher. Today, this movement is reflected more in femtech, “which however surfs both on the real needs of tools for women’s health and on marketing”, specifies Joëlle Schwarz.
Doctor Nathalie Beuret-Lepori opened one of the first centers specializing in women’s health in Lausanne 16 years ago. The objective: to specialize in order to improve knowledge and management of women’s diseases. However, she qualifies: “The skill centers are multiplying, but it’s not only positive. We must not forget the other areas of competence and the training necessary to keep up to date, which is always more advanced and takes a lot of time. A positive consequence of this market development, however, is the improved information for patients.
Health research is still often carried out on 100% male panels, in particular to simplify monitoring without too many hormonal variations, or without taking into account the potential differences between men and women, explains Joëlle Schwarz. This leads to significant misunderstanding. “With the Covid, we saw much more pronounced side effects of the vaccine in women,” she recalls.
Another striking example: the so-called “typical” symptoms of a heart attack are those found in men (arm and chest pain, shortness of breath) while the more common symptoms in women are described as “atypical” (nausea, sweating, dizziness) and less well detected by the patients themselves and by the nursing staff. Women die more of cardiovascular diseases than men, slips the specialist.
The stereotypes are also visible in the other direction: the symptoms of depression are well known in women (sadness, feeling of isolation) while less in men (aggressiveness, withdrawal into alcohol). “Medical students are now trained in these questions, but there is still a long way to go. In particular, as in the United States or the EU, the question of gender in the samples should be asked in Switzerland as well.” According to the researcher, a major effort must also be made on lesser-known female diseases, such as endometriosis.