By Ada Alvarez
Independent Journalist
We need to talk about women's health, according to Janine Clayton, M.D., deputy director from the Office of Research on Women's Health.
"Women became a topic in the nineties, and all we could hear about was pregnancy. Women's health was considered to be about our reproductive system, but we it's more. We are not an organ, we should be seen by a whole and we need to cover the biological needs and reactions by sex and gender," Clayton said during a panel about women's health research at Health Journalism 2010.
All panelists agreed there is a need to make distinctions between sex and gender and that both should be considered while covering and studying women's health issues. "Sex is based on the reproductive organs, but gender is the self representation that's created in response to social institutions," Clayton said.
Collen Fitzgerald, M.D. medical director of the Women's Health Rehabilitation Program agreed and explained the importance of gender roles in treatment. "We see many women neglecting treatment because they don't know that they are having abnormal reactions in their pregnancy or after, and most of that comes by word of mouth and myths that surround our role while giving birth; there's a need to talk about what they expect from us and what everybody thinks is normal versus what is scientifically accurate."
The panel also talked about diversity. Judy Graham, a Chicago Tribune reporter, explained that it was important to expand the coverage to specific topics such as differences between women and cultural considerations. "Women's health coverage is practically new but it's specifically targeting pregnancies, heart diseases of breast cancer, it's what we hear the most but while we expand coverage we need to get from the general to the specific and we have brought a panelist that will explain what is being done with Hispanic women", said Graham before presenting the next panelist.
"Women represent 13 percent of the population, and 33 percent of Hispanics are women," said Aida Giachello, director of the Midwest Latino Health Research, Training and Policy Center.
"We have to understand the role of acculturation on women's health, it affects body functions and it increases chances of depression and mental illnesses. It is a national problem that we need to address; 70 percent of immigrants don't have health insurance and those women, the ones usually in charge of the whole family's health, should not be ignored," explained Giachello after showing several statistics on diseases that varied by ethnicity.
