One Piece Medicine Instead of Just Bikini

I had both a relieved and angry reaction to the article in yesterday’s Times, Men, Women More Different Than Thought. Turns out the medical profession is finally acknowledging that there is more to “women’s health” than what goes on in our uteri. As the article says, there is a “quiet but revolutionary change infiltrating U.S. medicine as a growing number of scientists realize there’s more to women’s health than just the anatomy that makes them female, and that the same diseases often affect men and women in different ways.”
HELLOOOOO? What year is it? I’m glad this transformation is finally happening (because for years women have been misdiagnosed and mistreated for lack of female-specific research on disease), but I can’t help but feel angry that it took them until 2004 to do this. Think of how many women have suffered as a result!
I’m super thankful for women’s involvement in the medical profession. Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association,
“became the journal’s first female editor in 1999, [and] says she has made it a mission to publish only research in which data are broken down by sex unless it involves a disease that affects just men or women.”
YEE HAW! Final-fucking-ly!
For more information on women’s health (NOT JUST REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH!) see our Health issue page.