Photo credit: Casey Berna
It’s a turning point in women’s health and how medicine is being practiced right now. Everyone I talk to, from doctors to insurance companies, are shocked at the paucity of options, the medieval treatments recommended by ACOG, and want to know more about the endometriosis patient population, women’s health and what they can do to improve patient outcomes.
With advocate Casey Berna’s petition and direct actions, clinicians, patients, professional societies like the AAGL, and non-profit groups around the world together are taking on the American Congress of Ob-Gyn’s to update their negligent treatment standards. Endometriosis specialists are putting themselves on the line and speaking out. Patients are writing about the dismaying lack of options in endometriosis treatment in The New York Times and Teen Vogue. Governments are apologizing to women about the lack of treatment options. We’re also eagerly awaiting Shannon Cohn’s next documentary about the social justice issues around women’s healthcare.
But it’s not just endometriosis — writers like Maya Dusenberry are documenting the abhorrent lack of scientific research on women’s bodies in her new book Do No Harm. Across the board we’re waking up to the clinical facts that there simply is not adequate knowledge about women’s bodies and how they work. When we look at this across the board, it’s terrifying, but the steep dropoff into what I call the gyno ghetto – is even more terrifying. In the face of a lack of evidence or knowledge – gynecological and maternal care revert to myths from as far back as the 5th century BC.
The very definition of endometriosis that is conventionally accepted – uterine lining gone rogue – is straight from the Hippocrates wandering womb theory. In actuality, endometriosis are cells very similar to endometrium – but under a microscope they have many differences, so many that some cancer researchers find them more close to non-terminal, non-mutating cancer cells. Fibroids, which cause a loss of productivity from $5.9 to $34.4 billion annually in the U. S. — have no known origin. NO ONE HAS BOTHERED TO LOOK TO FIND OUT WHY THEY FORM. Why? Because, women’s bodies.
The lack of factual evidence, standard diagnostic treatments and attention to women’s quality of life, combined with the havoc endocrine disruptors are wreaking on our health, is an impending public health crisis. Stay tuned.