Across India, between school runs, work calls, ageing parents, and festival planning, a woman realises she has not had her annual check-up in three years. She has counselled everyone she knows, to eat better, sleep more, walk daily, and, yet, her own health remains an afterthought, scribbled somewhere between grocery lists and meeting notes. It is a familiar irony. And, believe me, a costly one.
For generations, women have prioritised caring for others over caring for themselves. This quiet selflessness—often praised as strength—turns dangerous when health systems reflect the same neglect. When society assumes she will wait, and medicine quietly agrees.
The consequences are not only clinical, there is a societal and economic impact as well. Health is the bedrock of productivity. As India envisions a future led by women, and wants more women to enter the workforce, their wellbeing must become a national priority. No economy can thrive when half its population is structurally underserved in health care. Women-led development begins with women-centred health.
Imaging: Deni Lal
Over decades, women were excluded from clinical trials. Not out of cruelty, but out of misplaced convenience. Hormones. Risk. Complexity. These were reasons given to sideline half the population from the very science meant to serve them. In doing so, medicine evolved around a reference model primarily grounded in male physiology, with the needs and nuances of the female gender often overlooked in research and clinical training.
Even today, women often face diagnostic delays and disparities. For instance, studies show they are significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed during heart attacks, as their symptoms often differ from the classic male-centred patterns described in textbooks. Women are also more likely to receive delayed pain relief compared to men, with their symptoms often attributed to psychological causes. Also, conditions such as endometriosis and autoimmune disorders are quite common in women. They continue to be under-researched, underfunded, and insufficiently integrated into medical curricula. These gaps are not due to rarity, but to longstanding systemic blind spots.
This neglect sits not only in textbooks, but in the waiting rooms of everyday life. Women delay check-ups. They absorb discomfort. They downplay pain. Across cultures and income levels, they have been conditioned to endure quietly, to normalise fatigue, and to postpone care until it can no longer be ignored. Good health becomes something they give, but rarely receive. And when they do seek it, they often find a system unprepared to understand them.
There is something philosophical about this pattern. Health is not just science; it reflects what we choose to value. For too long, our choices have excluded women steadily and systemically.
Rewriting this story requires more than good intentions. It demands that research include women as standard, not exception. That diagnostic criteria reflect female presentations, not simply male baselines. That doctors are trained to listen without bias. And women are reminded—by systems, by science, and by society—that their health is not a luxury, or a reward at the end of sacrifice. It is the starting point of everything else.
So, what if she just went to the doctor? What if she stopped pushing that appointment to next week? What if the world, for once, met her halfway—with care that saw her clearly, and science that studied her fully?
Perhaps, then, she would not merely endure the calendar of her responsibilities, she would rise beyond it. And that, truly, is where the future of medicine must begin!
Dr Preetha Reddy is Executive Vice Chairperson of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Limited.