Women`s health care accounts for more than two-thirds of all health-care dollars spent in this country, yet women are left out of medical research for almost every disease.
Excluding childbirth, breast cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility and contraception, ”almost everything we know about health has been learned by studying men,” says Dr. Antonia Novello, U.S. surgeon general.
The Society for the Advancement of Women`s Health Research, a 2-year-old non-profit organization of health-care workers, hopes to close that gender gap by developing a national agenda for women`s health research. On Monday and Tuesday the society will meet at the University of Illinois at Chicago with about 50 women`s health-care specialists to assess needs and lay out strategies.
The conference is the next step in creating an agenda, which will be presented in January to the Congressional Caucus for Women`s Issues, an independent advisory committee that proposes legislation.
The agenda will be based on health service needs and research imbalances identified by 25 national medical societies and at regional data-gathering hearings, the most recent of which was held Nov. 5 in Chicago.
At the Chicago hearing, more than 25 local medical professionals, women`s health-care advocates and social service agents testified on a variety of problems, including the dearth of women in medical practice, inadequate gender-specific research on poor minority women and immunological diseases that affect more women than men.
Dr. Florence Haseltine, director of the Center for Population Research and liaison to the Women`s Health Initiative at the National Institutes of Health, said that information gathered from the hearings will provide health- care policymakers and supporters of medical research with ”data regarding the ways in which they should allocate research dollars to ensure equitable medical treatment for women.”
”`Women`s health` sounds like `motherhood and apple pie,` ” said Irma Meban, an epidemiologist at NIH`s Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and board member of the society. ”It`s easy for politicians to get behind it.”
Novello has voiced her support.
”It`s time for some examination not just of research but of assumptions and attitudes as well,” she said in a recent speech on women`s health care at another event in Chicago.
One of the problems to be examined is the dearth of women in medical studies and medical practice, particularly in leadership positions.
”In the `50s and `60s,” Haseltine said, ”there was a research explosion.” The NIH recruited male doctors, who studied men, she said.
The exclusion of women became a self-perpetuating error.
”Why study women when the work`s already been done on men?” Haseltine asked rhetorically. But pressure to include women in studies has increased in proportion to the number of women entering medical professions, she said.
In at least one new class of doctors in training at Rush Medical College at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke`s Medical Center, women make up 59 percent of the enrollment, said panelist Dr. Verna Skul, a medical professor at the college.
Among other problems targeted at the Chicago hearing were health-care concerns of poor minority women.
”Forty percent of all African-American women in the U.S. are single heads of households, and 90 percent of those live below the poverty level,”
said Dr. Gloria Jackson-Bacon, a private practitioner and director of The Clinic in Altgeld, which serves public housing residents in Chicago.
High blood pressure is 45 percent more common, and diabetes is 33 percent more common in African-Americans than whites, Jackson-Bacon said. c8
