Sick Sisters.(Statistical Data Included)

How feminist politics is warping medicine

We are now on the threshold of politically correct medicine. P.C. health care is powered by the idea that injustice produces disease, and that political empowerment is the cure. It is a false promise.

Though the activists behind politically correct medicine appear to be fighting for better health, their actions do not prevent disease, alleviate symptoms, or perfect treatments. At best, they create distractions and waste money; at worst, they interfere with effective diagnosis and doctoring. Although the agitators themselves may end up feeling better for having taken part in a "social justice" movement, they undermine the Hippocratic ideal of putting patients first. Instead, P.C. medicine puts ideology first.

According to Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, the toxicity of women s breasts will be one of the major political issues of the new millennium. "There are hundreds of synthetic chemicals in breast milk," Ireland pronounced recently on Capitol Hill. "We are poisoning the earth, and women are dying because of it" About 60 women's and health advocacy organizations joined with Ireland to demand more federal funding for diseases that are supposedly killing more and more women. "The evidence--and our bodies--continue to pile up," claim the advocates. A male-dominated medical system, they say, systematically slights America's females. "Women are invisible in the health care system beyond their reproductive systems. The medical model using male science, male body, male culture is still the norm. Women die unnecessarily due to this male perspective," asserts the Foundation for Women's Health.

The foundation's goal is to create a specialty in "women's health" similar to surgery or pediatrics. The American College of Women's Health Physicians is lobbying for the same thing. "Those of us who were exposed to Women's Studies in college find Women's Health a very natural transition and progression," writes Kelley Phillips, president of the college.

It may seem odd that women would need their own specialty. For most doctors (except urologists and orthopedists), treating women patients is the norm, since women make greater use of health care services than men do. Women are especially overrepresented in the age groups that rely most heavily on medical services--the elderly. Indeed, apart from the urological problems that beset old men, geriatrics could reasonably be said to be a woman's specialty, because there are more than two women for every man over age 85.

Nonetheless, the Office of Women's Health at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been promoting a separate medical school curriculum in women's health. "Curricula in women's health should begin to erase the misconceptions caused by a generation of training physicians in the male model of disease," explains HHS official Elena V. Rios.