Cathy Young on Women’s Health
Some days I think I could just replace this web site with a page saying “go read Cathy Young.” She really hits her stride in a Salon.Com article, Medical gender wars, which deflates a lot of the myths put out by individuals and groups that the medical establishment fails women due to sexism (the “patriarchal medicine” myth).
Young really drives home the hypocrisy of this claim in that activists can’t even decide amongst themselves whether a given health care approach is good or bad for women, leading to a damned if you do, damned if you don’t result.
What’s more, with some activists, “patriarchal medicine” can’t win no matter what it does. First, male doctors are accused of doing too many hysterectomies and gratuitously cutting up women’s bodies. (While hysterectomies are far more common in the U.S. than in Western Europe, this difference seems to reflect less gender bias than the overall scalpel-happy attitude of American physicians; it is just as stark with regard to male-specific surgical procedures like prostatectomy.) As a result, HMOs try to curb questionable hysterectomies and are accused of denying care to women. First, a highly politicized breast cancer movement claims that a terrible disease that affects only women has been neglected. Then, in 1999, a women’s health exhibit at the Maryland Science Center blames our society’s fixation on breasts as a “symbol of women’s sexual desirability” for a disproportionate focus on breast cancer to the exclusion of some other diseases that pose a greater threat to women.
The Cathy Young on Women’s Health by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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