Health and Beauty Articles for Women

Bulimia (buh-LEE -me-ah) nervosa, typically called bulimia, is a type of eating disorder. Someone with bulimia eats a lot of food in a short amount of time (called bingeing) and then tries to prevent weight gain by purging. Purging might be done in these ways:
• making oneself throw up
• taking laxatives, pills, or liquids that increase how fast food moves through your body and leads to a bowel movement (BM)
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By: Women’S Health
Basic Information
Description
Symptoms that begin seven (7) to fourteen (14) days prior to a menstrual period and usually stop when menstruation begins. About half of all women experience PMS at some time, some very frequently. The peak incidence occurs between ages 25 and 40.

Frequent Signs and Symptoms
• Nervousness and irritability.
• Dizziness or fainting.
• Emotional instability.
• Increased or decreased sex drive.
• Headaches.
• Tender, swollen breasts.
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BY : HEART OF WOMAN
A single risk factor increases your chances of developing, or worsening, heart-related problems.

And the more of them you have, or the more severe any one risk factor is, the more concerned you should be about the possibility of having a heart attack:
â–ª Cigarette smoking
â–ª High blood pressure
â–ª High cholesterol
â–ª Overweight
â–ª Lack of physical activity
â–ª Diabetes
â–ª Hormone Replacement Therapy
â–ª Family history of heart disease
â–ª High-risk age or race
â–ª Poor nutrition
â–ª Stress
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By, Orlando Regional
Many people think that low fat means low flavor. Nothing could be further from the truth. With a little know-how, you can cook the foods you love in a way that promotes heart health rather than heart disease. The tips and recipes on this page will get you started.

Nine painless ways to cut fat from your diet:

1. Choose the leanest cuts of meat you can find.

2. Stop frying. Roast, bake, broil or grill instead.
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By, Orlando Regional
Know the warning signs of the other coronary killer

Some 700,000 Americans suffer strokes each year, and nearly 163,000 of them die. Surprisingly, women account for more than 60 percent of stroke fatalities. These gloomy statistics would improve if more people knew the warning signs.
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© Lauri M. Aesoph N.D.
The good news is age doesn’t have to mean forgetful days, heart attacks and brittle bones. As middle aged baby boomers approach the senior years, geriatric research is gaining momentum. We’re learning how preventive health practices–exercise, diet, no smoking, alcohol and stress reduction–increase and enrich life.

Nutritional investigations are also uncovering the vital role vitamins and minerals play in age related illnesses. As you get older, your need for certain nutrients rise–something the current U.S. Recommended Daily Allowances don’t take into account.
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What You Need to Know

Read this information to learn about:
• How medicines can work differently in women and men.
• What you can do to help your medicines work best for you.

Be aware of how your medicines—both prescription and non-prescription medicines—affect your body.
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by Anne S. Kasper, Ph.D. .

Health care reform has long been a women’s issue. Since the beginnings of the Women’s Health Movement in the late 1960s, women have known that the health care system does not work in the best interests of women’s health. When we think of the health care system and its component parts – doctors, hospitals, clinics, and prescription drugs, for instance – we are increasingly aware that the current system is not designed to promote and maintain our personal health or the health of others. Instead, we are aware of a medical system that delivers sporadic, interventionist, hi-tech, and curative care when what we need most often is continuous, primary, low-tech, and preventive care. Women are the majority of the uninsured and the underinsured as well as the majority of health care providers. We are experts on our health, the health of our families, and the health of our communities. We know that we need a health care system that must be a part of changes in other social spheres — such as wage work, housing, poverty, inequality, and education — since good health care results from more than access to medical services.

Health care reform in the U.S. was attempted many times during the last century. Our biggest successes occurred in 1965 with the creation of the Medicaid and Medicare programs, which have provided health care to millions of poor, underserved, and older persons. Most large scale efforts in reforming the system have focused on providing universal health coverage – creating a national health insurance program which would entitle every individual to health care as a right. To date every attempt has failed because the forces arrayed against universal health coverage see it as the end to the enormous profits made in the medical industry. With business ruling the day, it is no accident that the U.S. is the world’s most powerful economic engine and simultaneously the only industrialized country without a universal health care program.

Committee for National Health Insurance.

Women have played a consistent and determined role in health care reform efforts. In the early 1970s, the Committee for National Health Insurance, a labor-sponsored group in Washington, DC, organized the first conference on women and national health insurance. Labor unions, primarily the United Auto Workers from the early days of Walter Reuther as well as the Coalition for Labor Union Women, had long envisioned a national health insurance program for their rank and file. This first conference brought together women from around the country who were organizing to advocate for women’s health issues. The Committee rightfully imagined that women would want to include a national health program in their advocacy agenda. Many of the women who attended the conference were the founders and early organizers of the National Women’s Health Network, which would begin its work a few years later in 1976.

Secretary’s Advisory Committee on the Rights and Responsibilities of Women

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black woman to be U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, convened the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on the Rights and Responsibilities of Women (SACRRW). This public committee, one of the earliest federal efforts expressly designed to benefit women, was made up of 12 women members who were culturally and geographically diverse. The Committee, charged with looking at policies and programs with an impact on women and to advise the Secretary accordingly, reviewed the national health insurance (nhi) proposals being vigorously debated in Congress at that time. After reviewing the proposals, the Committee issued a polite statement that said, “It is the opinion of the Committee, and many women’s groups, that the legislative proposals pending do not precisely address some of the concerns women have when looking at a national health insurance plan.” However, the work of the Committee did not stop there. It commissioned a research paper, “Women and National Health Insurance: Where Do We Go From Here?,” which was designed to outline for the public some of the major issues and how women would be affected by a nhi plan. On May 2, 1980, SACRRW held a national conference of women’s groups to discuss the complex issues of coverage, financing, and participation in a national health program. Materials from the research paper and the conference were later included in a SACRRW publication made widely available to the public.

Many of the insurance issues that are relevant to women today were addressed in the work of SACRRW more than 20 years ago. For instance, because health insurance is linked with paid employment, the result is frequent discrimination against women. Women find themselves without coverage if they do not work continuously or full time because of childbearing and family responsibilities. Many women work in small businesses or service sector jobs where health insurance is not a covered benefit. Health insurance for women who work at home is not available save for women covered by Medicaid or Medicare or through a spouse. Today, as in the early 1980s, reproductive health services are not fully covered for most insured women. The same is true for preventive health care.

At the national conference held by SACRRW, women’s groups proposed ten principles as a guide to organizing and advocating on behalf of women and nhi. Among these principles were universal coverage or the inclusion of every individual living in the U.S. in a plan offering the same standard of comprehensive care. Other principles called for individual eligibility, meaning that women should be covered as individuals in their own right and not based on their marital or family status. Continuous coverage required that women’s laborforce employment should not act as a barrier and that pre-existing conditions or waiting periods should not exclude women from being covered. Other principles called for equitable financing, cost containment, and limited cost sharing. These proposed a shared, single-payer financing plan as well as limits on health care expenditures, deductibles, and co-payments. The principles also called for consumer participation and health care restructuring in a national system. With considerable foresight, this last principle adopted by the Committee and conference participants considered health care reform as an opportunity to create a system that promotes health, provides preventive and primary care, reaches the underserved, and empowers health workers.

The Campaign for Women’s Health

A more recent major effort at the national level was undertaken by the Campaign for Women’s Health. This coalition of more than 100 local, state, and national organizations began as a working group under the auspices of the Older Women’s League. The Campaign became the most vocal advocate for women’s interests in nhi during the Clinton Administration’s attempt at health care reform. The work of the Campaign was based on a set of principles that look much like the ones articulated by SACRRW, although they were more elaborate and included the importance of a women’s health research agenda.

Working with women’s health providers, activists, and others, we (Editor’s Note: Anne Kasper was the director of the Campaign) crafted a Model Benefits Package for Women (MBP), which spelled out in detail the comprehensive services needed by women in a reformed health system or national health program. Carol Weisman, in her book Women’s Health Care: Activist Traditions and Institutional Change, said the MBP “may be the best available collaborative statement of what women want in their health care.” The MBP states that “All services which are necessary or appropriate for the maintenance and promotion of women’s health should be included in a benefits package.” For instance,the section on primary and preventive care calls for a shift toward services that are low-cost and provide hands-on care from a range of health practitioners in outpatient settings. The section on reproductive health care states that the full complement of reproductive services are an integral part of women’s health and well-being and that these services must include maternity care, family planning, abortion, infertility, and care for sexually transmitted diseases in addition to the periodic gynecologic history and exam. The section on long-term care for women calls for a continuum of home, community, and institutional settings for medical services, health care, personal care, nutrition, counseling, and social services.

What’s Ahead. Health care reform comes in waves, with periods of intense activity followed by dormant times when not much seems to be happening. Many people concluded that one of the reasons the wave of health care reform failed during the Clinton Administration was lack of public support. The Clinton plan was crafted by policy makers in Washington, DC and debated primarily by power brokers within the Beltway. Today, more of us are uninsured than when President Clinton took office in 1992. Some 44 million individuals — almost 20 percent of our population under 65 — are uninsured. 85 percent of these individuals are working — 60 percent of them full time — or are in families where someone is working, but insurance is not available or is too costly. With these facts in mind, the next wave of reform is beginning to take shape.

Today the first steps toward true reform of the health care system are occurring at many levels, with the states the places to watch. For instance, U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota and a longtime advocate for a single payer system, introduced a bill in summer 2000 that would enable states to decide how to provide health care coverage to their residents. Quoted in the November 1, 2000 issue of the newspaper the Progressive Populist, Wellstone said, “Our plan tells states and governors to choose their way to universal coverage, and then backs up that promise with the federal support necessary to help them get there.”

Once again, as we move toward another wave of reform, it is time for women’s voices to be heard. The Women’s Universal Health Initiative calls for women to be informed and educated about the need for reform so that they can be advocates in their own communities. The Initiative calls for women to identify their needs in a reformed system, encourages diverse communities of women to speak out, and calls for women to be active agents of change as reform moves forward.

One final note !

We should not expect that universal health insurance will end all our health care woes.

Insurance coverage itself does not guarantee access to high quality health services. In the process of working toward a universal health system, women must work toward changing the existing bureaucratic, exclusionary, and profiteering system to one of equity, caring, and affordable health care delivery from which all individuals can be assured that their health and well-being will benefit.

The Wall Street Journal | March 3, 2001

By Sally Satel

That women are second-class citizens of the medical research establishment is a claim much trumpeted. Hillary Rodham Clinton once remarked on the “appalling degree to which women were routinely excluded from major clinical trials of most illnesses.” A recent report of the Commission on Civil Rights claimed that “women have been excluded from clinical trials for decades.” Last June the Harvard Women’s Health Watch proclaimed that “nearly all drug testing has been done on men.”

But what we know is wrong. Last week the National Institutes of Health, which had stated in 1997 that “women were routinely excluded” from its research, issued a retraction of this claim. The Institutes’ recognition of this error (made in two letters to a Rockville, Md.-based advocacy group called Men’s Health America) is most welcome.

But don’t expect the women’s health lobby — the network of public “offices of women’s health” that exist on the state and federal levels, and the university-based “women’s health centers” — to admit it any time soon. For these groups must make women appear embattled and shortchanged if they are to gain government support, raise funds and justify themselves in the eyes of the public.

The NIH retraction comes a few months after the publication of a study by Curt Meinert and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. Writing in the journal Controlled Clinical Trials, Mr. Meinert debunks an enduring feminist myth: that there is gender bias in medical research. His review of major medical journals in 1985, 1990 and 1995 found that female subjects outnumbered males at a rate of 13 to 1 across all cancer trials, with the vast bulk of the women participating in trials specifically for breast cancer. Yet the myth found its way into Al Gore’s campaign platform: “Throughout my career I have fought for more research funds for those diseases so recently considered less important because they befell only women, such as breast cancer. . . . I pledge to you: women’s health will always be at the top of my agenda.”

It’s hard to know what more any president could do, especially regarding breast cancer. Breast cancer research has received more money than any other cancer since 1985, the year the National Cancer Institute began keeping good records of disease-specific funding. Using the yardstick of “years of healthy life lost,” breast cancer is one of the five most generously funded illnesses, according to a 1999 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The other four are heart disease, dementia, AIDS and diabetes.

And breast cancer is not an exception. Women were routinely included in all trials for years. Back in 1979, 268 of the 293 NIH-funded clinical trials contained female subjects. Food and Drug Administration surveys in 1983 and 1988 found that “both sexes had substantial representation in clinical trials.”

Why is it important to topple the myth that women are shortchanged by medical research? Because the notion that women have been denied their fair share of breakthroughs has been used to lobby for policies and resources that waste money and, worse, unwittingly harm women.

Recall the great mammography debate in the U.S. Senate. In 1997 an NIH consensus group declared that women in their 40s need not undergo yearly mammograms. The group reasoned that the relatively high rates of false diagnosis in 40-50 year-old women — and the needless surgery that may accompany such a diagnosis — did not outweigh the small reduction in mortality that the mammograms would yield.

Women under 50, then, were advised to make a decision with their doctor. Reasonable enough, but the lack of firm guidance incensed a cadre of women senators and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R., Maine) led the crusade to pressure the NIH to change its recommendation to one of annual mammograms for all. During the debate, Ms. Snowe boasted to the Washington Post that “it was my female colleagues and I who led the charge to put an end to clinical trials entirely on men — even for breast cancer.”

Breast cancer is a serious matter, but women’s health suffers when the emphasis on breast cancer overshadows the five-fold larger risk of death from heart disease. This is where responsible women’s health advocates come in, to educate women about relative health risks and the importance of timely screening for blood pressure, diabetes, and cervical and breast cancer.

Finally, the notion that women need to be compensated for being left out has led to the expenditure of millions of federal and state dollars to create “offices of women’s health” within health agencies to oversee various expenditures and create new programs for women’s health. Instead of building bureaucracies, the money would be better spent on research or direct delivery of care.

An exception, in my view, is the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health. Ably run for about a decade, that office has been collecting the data that show how widely women’s health has indeed been studied. Thanks to its efforts, we know that the composition of subjects in all clinical trials funded in 1998 — the last year for which there are data — was 68% women. In fact, despite its self-defeating rhetoric about exclusion, the NIH was the very font of decades of outstanding research in which women were routinely included.

The NIH’s official declaration that women have not been shortchanged by no means denies that progress still needs to be made in the health of women. But it is wrongheaded to confuse the need to know more — an imperative that will always be with us — with the myth that women are given short shrift by medical research.

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