Q & A with Caroline Wentworth

Today, we meet a healthcare professional at the beginning of her career. Caroline Wentworth, who graduated from Yale in 2013, is now studying to be a gynecologist at Washington University in St. Louis. She describes how her interest in women’s health and sexual and reproductive health came to be a career plan. She notes that medical schools could become more sensitive to issues of sex and gender and describes how she hopes to do the same in her relationships with her patients. Thanks once again to our California correspondents, Jennifer Qiao and Vivian Chan, both Yale Class of 2013, for conducting this interview.

What attracted you to medical school?

I initially became interested in public health, and that interest slowly evolved into the idea of pursuing medicine as a career. I’ve always been interested in women’s health and sexual and reproductive health, so I joke that I knew I wanted to be a gynecologist before I knew I wanted to be a doctor.

I was a sex educator through high school and college, and I loved being able to have conversations with people, conversations that frequently other people find uncomfortable. I felt that was a skill I could translate really well into talking to patients.

Has your education so far exposed you to information concerning how sex and gender influence the development, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases and conditions?

Before I decided to specialize in gynecology, during the beginning years of medical school, there were certain things you’d learn, such as: women are supposed to get mammograms to screen for breast cancer, men have increased risk of prostate cancer as they get older, heart disease develops at different ages for men and women. From that perspective, we did learn about those basic scientific differences in medical school.

During my first year of medical school, however, I began to notice subtle ways in which women’s health wasn’t always given its due attention. For instance the anatomical drawings we used in anatomy class were all male bodies. Most of the time it doesn’t seem to matter — a spleen is a spleen, whether it’s in a man or a woman. But it felt like we were not learning the female anatomical structures in as great depth as we were male anatomical structures. It felt like the baseline was male, and you had to ask more questions to learn about how women might be different.

Are men and women more or less the same when it comes to their health? How so?

I think there are two ways to approach this question.

The first is the more straightforward way: men and women have certain organ systems that are different. For example, women can’t get prostate cancer and men can’t get cervical cancer.

Thinking more critically about the question though, we don’t actually know whether men and women are the same when it comes to health in a lot of ways that are important. A lot of research that has been done on health has been done on mostly male research participants. For example, women may not notice heart attacks as quickly because women can experience different symptoms than men and what’s often seen in the media. The bigger issue isn’t what we know to be different, but what is there that’s different that we don’t know yet?

What do you think medical students should be taught regarding how sex and gender relate to health and disease?

I will preface my answer by saying there tends to be a trend towards enumerating all the things medical schools need to be teaching, but there are only so many hours in the day. I know how busy medical students are and how much we already have to learn.

That being said, there are definitely ways we can take what we are already learning and make sure that it’s taught in a responsible and sex/gender-conscious way. For example, when medical schools teach about diseases, instructors should make sure to point out any known sex and gender differences and tell medical students when we don’t know if there are any differences. Let’s get medical students fired up to do research to answer these questions. An important part of med school is being aware of where the holes are and inspiring people to fill in those gaps.

What part do you hope to play in the way medical practitioners approach sex and gender?

People realize that when you go to the gynecologist, you are a female-specific doctor, and that changes the way they interact with you. For me, it’s important to acknowledge the unique experience of being a woman and how that might affect health. For example, how does someone’s health relate to her being a mother, or her facing workplace discrimination, or to the gender roles at home? It’s important to keep those things in mind. I’m excited to be the kind of physician that talks about sex and gender, and hopefully my patients who are less comfortable with these topics will feel they can confide in me.

What are you looking forward to most in your medical career?

Having one! ;)

In all seriousness, I’m really looking forward to having these real, sensitive, and empowering conversations with my patients. Being a source of knowledge for other women is a huge honor. Not everyone is lucky enough to be trusted in that way.