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This is Reference Man.
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He's a white, 30-year-old male who weighs about 155 pounds.
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And he decides how we live.
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For decades, industries have considered this the standard human, and designed the world around him.
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Everything from air conditioning in offices to cars, even military equipment.
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But there are other ways we use Reference Man that aren't so obvious.
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Like in medicine, where it doesn't just lead to discomfort.
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Here, the disparity can be incredibly dangerous for women.
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A few years ago, something strange was happening.
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Headline after headline recounted a similar story.
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Dozens of women were crashing their cars under the influence of sleeping pills.
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In many of these cases, they had taken a dose of Zolpidem the night before.
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It's what you probably know as the common sleep aid, Ambien.
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The problem wasn't entirely the drug itself—it was the dosage.
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Women and men were both prescribed 10 milligrams of the drug for 8 hours of sleep.
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But it turns out, women metabolize the active ingredient in Ambien twice as slowly as men.
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That means by the time men woke up the next day, the effects of the pill had usually worn off.
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While for many women, the drug was still in their system.
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After the crashes, the Food and Drug Administration issued a safety warning in 2013 and changed the recommended dosage for women, cutting it in half.
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The reason the right dosage for women had been overlooked is that the clinical trials on Ambien focused on male test subjects.
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If they're using this hypothetical "average man" and they are basing dosage on it, that's kind of scary.
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Not just because it doesn't apply to women, but because it also doesn't apply to a lot of men either.
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There are several factors that can affect how a person metabolizes drugs, from size to body fat to hormonal fluctuations.
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And these factors can vary drastically based on sex.
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But many clinical trials don't account for this.
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They often don't include enough women as test subjects.
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And even when they do, data from women is often mixed in with data from men, which can hide sex-specific reactions to medicine.
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I don't care that it's more effective for men.
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I just want to know: Is it going to be effective for me as a woman?
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So, you don't know that unless you look separately at those groups.
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Take Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.
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It's flushed from a woman's body slower than in men, so the prescribed dosage can put women at more risk for potential overdose and liver failure.
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And one heart medication that's supposed to prevent heart attacks may actually trigger one in women.
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So, we know that this is still a problem, but it's so hard to know how often that happens because there's no research.
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If the companies did a better job of looking at men and women separately and studying them separately,
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I think we'd have a lot more dosages that are different for women and men.
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In 1993, the National Institutes of Health created regulations saying women must be included in human studies and have their data analyzed separately.
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But the problem is...
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It's the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, that's making the decisions about what medications are being sold to you and to your loved ones,
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and they are not required to include women, people of color, people over 65.
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You know, if you're only studying white men, you don't have to study as many people.
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And the more people you study, the more it costs to do the research.
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But, the more meaningful the information is so that we can all make informed decisions about what's good for us.