Doing Harm Quotes

“Of course, pregnant women are no less in need of safe, effective medical treatments than anyone else. Each year, over 400,000 women in the United States battle significant illnesses while pregnant. And many women have chronic conditions, from hypertension to autoimmune diseases to depression, that they must manage with medications. As bioethicist Francoise Baylis wrote in a 2010 Nature article, 'Pregnant women get sick, and sick women get pregnant.' Indeed, 90 percent of women take some medication during pregnancy, and about 70 percent take a prescription drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The average woman receives 1.3 prescriptions per obstetric visit, and nearly two-thirds of women use four to five medications during pregnancy and labor.

But with little actual research to go on, doctors are simply guessing at how drugs will affect a pregnant body, and their best predictions can be disastrously off.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“Given the NIH's lack of record keeping, it was impossible to say exactly how underrepresented women were, but the public learned that women had been left out of many of the largest, most important clinic studies conducted in the last couple of decades. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which began in 1958 and purported to explore 'normal human aging,' didn't enroll any women for the first twenty years it ran. The Physicians' Health Study, which had recently concluded that taking a daily aspirin may reduce the risk of heart disease? Conducted in 22,071 men and zero women. The 1982 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial - known, aptly enough, as MRFIT - which looked at whether dietary change and exercise could help prevent heart disease: just 13,000 men.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“Still, while not the source of this polarization, the medical system deserves some blame for failing to forcefully stand up to it. While medical groups like the AMA have certainly objected to lawmakers masquerading as ob-gyns, mainstream medicine can hardly claim to be a staunch defender of abortion's place within women's health care. In a country in which about a million abortions are performed each year, a 2005 survey of ob-gyn programs found that over half didn't off any clinical exposure to the procedure and about a fifth provided no formal education on it at all. While 97 percent of practicing ob-gyns have had a patient seeking an abortion, just 14 percent perform them. Abortion care is usually physically relegated to stand-alone specialty clinics. The doctors who do offer the procedure often face stigma from their colleagues and are left largely on their own to fight against political interference in the doctor-patient relationship, which should provoke mass outcry from the entire profession.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“Women wait sixty-five minutes to men's forty-nine before getting treatment for abdominal pain in the emergency room. Young women are seven times more likely to be sent home from the hospital in the middle of having a heart attack. Women face long delays, often years long, to get diagnosed even with diseases that are quite common in women. And they experience longer diagnostic delays in comparison to men for nearly everything, from brain tumors to rare genetic disorders.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“In 1987,
for example, 225 employees got sick after 27,000 feet of new carpet was installed
in the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“CDC officials had lied to Congress about where the
money went. In 2000, the GAO reported that progress on understanding
the disease had been hindered by the theft, as well as by poor coordination
between the CDC's and NIH's programs.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“45 percent said they'd somewhat commonly canceled or postponed
a doctor's appointment because they wanted to drop a few pounds first.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

“A 2013 review, for example, found that in 304 studies on cancer
treatment and prevention conducted between 2001 and 2010, nearly 60
percent of subjects were men and over 80 percent were white.”
― Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick