First-ever WH conference on women's health research
It's a step in the right direction...if we see it again
The first-ever WH conference on women's health research: Those of us of the female persuasion know intimately that research on conditions women experience more than men is embarrassingly absent in a country that theoretically has the best healthcare in the world (a topic for another day). I’m separately posting (Connect the Dots) some good reasons for that—well, good at the time, anyway. It did get exciting in May 2001 when the NIH Institute of Medicine announced women are biologically different than men; good to know. But not much has changed since then.
The trick in the US for-profit healthcare system is, of course, whether or not someone—pharmaceutical companies, surgeons, to name a couple—can make a buck on it…always a sterling motivator for research. Consider menopause: companies can hardly say the word out loud without turning red, and it’s not a high revenue event for providers or anyone else. For women, it’s a very different story. Just like the story of a birth, any woman can tell you about the day she figured out that’s what was going on with her body.
So give Joe and Jill credit for trying to push more of it; any boost will help. What will be more telling, of course, is the what the next administration does.