Sex and gender concepts in gender-specific medicine

Over the last decades, the role of sex and gender in healthcare has been increasingly acknowledged by physicians. In fact, a new gender-specific branch of medicine has rapidly developed. It is important to recognize and investigate when and how sex and gender can affect a patient’s health and whether sex and gender play a role in disease prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Moreover, it is also necessary to determine when and how sex and gender affect the way in which a patient is seen and treated by doctors. In this paper, we analyze only two central issues of that debate. First, we argue that gender-specific medicine tends to misrepresent and confuse the concepts of sex and gender. Second, we illustrate how this new sub-discipline implicitly but extensively presupposes the sharp distinction between exactly two sexes and exactly two genders. In particular, we shall demonstrate why these issues may constitute a problem for gender-specific medicine and propose some methods of dealing with them to enhance medicine in general.