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We Have Come a Long Way : Women ’ s Health at the Turn of the Millennium
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Gilbert, Michael J. |
| Abstract | Twenty-six years have passed since the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. 1 That bestselling book marked the beginning of a major change in women's attitudes about taking active responsibility for their health and about insisting on relationships with their physicians based on mutual health care decision-making. Women also began to lobby for research that would better define their health care needs: Women were becoming increasingly unwilling to accept as pertinent to them findings from observational studies or clinical trials that included only men. Lacking scientific data to indicate otherwise, the medical establishment appeared to assume that, excepting issues of reproductive health, women's health needs were essentially the same as men's. Since then, enormous changes have come about in our knowledge about women's health needs and how to approach them. 2 During the 1980s, the groundwork was laid for substantial advances in research on women's health. In 1986 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established a policy that required researchers to include women and minorities in NIH-funded research. Also in the mid-1980s, the Society for the Advancement of Women's Health Research was created to help design and encourage research focused on women's issues. By 1991, when the US Department of Health and Human Services created the Office of Women's Health, a groundswell of support had arisen for clinical research on women's health. 3,4 In 1993, the Federal Drug Administration issued new guidelines that lifted the ban on including women of childbearing age in many clinical trials conducted to develop new drug products. In the early part of the 1990s, studies on women's health mushroomed, and although it is still too early to have definitive answers regarding many important issues, information from several large prospective, observational studies is changing the way that the medical establishment understands women's needs. During the past few years, important data have been collected from the Nurses Study, a prospective study begun in 1976 that has been closely monitoring several cohorts of nurses. Over the years, the thousands of nurses included in the study have provided researchers with survey responses as well as biologic samples ranging from toenails to vials of blood. 7 The Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN) is examining health issues of women at midlife and is comparing the health status of African American, Latino, Asian American and white women. 8 The Women's Health Initiative (WHI) … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.thepermanentejournal.org/files/Summer2000/millennium.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
