“The medical community has viewed women’s health with a bikini approach, focusing essentially on the breast and reproductive system,” Dr. Nanette Wenger, a leading expert on women’s heart disease, wrote. “The rest of the woman was virtually ignored in considerations of women’s health.” This kind of “bikini medicine” overlooked the fact that women had the same top three causes of death—heart disease, stroke, and cancer of all kinds—as men did, and also suffered disproportionately from many nonreproductive health conditions that had been long neglected.
