Outrageous Practices
Outrageous Practices
How Gender Bias Threatens Women's Health
Women's health is threatened by gender bias on three fronts: bias against women patients, bias against women doctors, health practitioners, and medical scientists, and bias against women as medical research subjects. Outrageous Practices, a highly acclaimed best-seller newly available in paperback, chronicles the history of a prejudiced health care establishment and shows how the current system remains captive to male-dominated medicine and research. The book examines how gender discrimination manifests itself in hospitals, physicians's and psychiatrists's offices, medical schools, research labs, government health-related agencies, and biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.
KEY POINTS:
o New paperback edition of a powerful book about gender bias in the medical establishment.
o New preface by authors brings the issues up-to-date.
Women can only hope that this carefully researched book will rapidly become a historical document, and that those who read it will exclaim, 'I can't believe this is the way it used to be!' Current readers - women, and men who care about women in their lives - will come away armed with a healthy cynicism about medical practices and the real need to challenge, question, and explore decisions made by medical practitioners.
An eye-opening look at medicine's treatment of women during the past two centuries... Certain to enrage and educate.
LESLIE LAURENCE is a medical journalist who write about women's health and health-care for magazines such as Glamour and Ladies' Home Journal. Laurence's syndicated column, "Her Health," appears in more than seventy-five newspapers nationwide.
BETH WEINHOUSE is a medical journalist writes a column for Parenting magazine and is the author of The Healthy Traveler .
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I DIAGNOSIS: GENDER BIAS
1 A Brief History of Medicine: A Legacy of Ignorance
2 Science and Medicine: Where Are the Women Now?
3 The Research Gap
PART II SECOND-CLASS PATIENTS
4 Women's Hearts: The Deadly Difference
5 Breast Cancer: Malignant Neglect
6 AIDS: Women Are Not Immune
7 Surgery: The Unkindest Cut
8 Reproductive Health: Fertile Ground for Bias
9 From Midlife to the Mature Years: The Medicalization of Aging
10 "It's All in Your Head": Misunderstanding Women's Complaints
11 Women's Mental Health: A Cruel Double Standard
PART III HEALING THE SYSTEM
12 Drug Marketing: Selling Women Out
13 Women and the Law: Unhealthy Judgments
14 Women and Doctors: A Troubled Relationship
15 The Future of Women's Health
Notes
Index
