Outrageous practices

Backlash exposed the undeclared war against American women in the workplace. The Beauty Myth shattered and forever changed how women perceive themselves. Now, in Outrageous Practices, medical journalists Leslie Laurence and Beth Weinhouse shine a penetrating light on the medical establishment and discover pervasive neglect, rampant gender bias, and systematized discrimination in women's health care - an issue that promises to galvanize women in the nineties.

A passionate and illuminating study, Outrageous Practices encompasses what no single book, article, speech, or conference has done - and lays bare the startling facts: women's medical complaints are more than twice as likely as men's to be dismissed by doctors as psychosomatic; 90% of women with breast cancer are eligible for lumpectomies, yet more than half will undergo mastectomies; no definitive research exists about the long-term safety of birth control pills, yet doctors have prescribed them to millions of women for decades; treatments for heart disease, the number one killer of women in this country, have been tested mainly on men; women with kidney failure are 30% less likely to receive kidney transplants than men; and in thirty years of research on treatments for alcoholism, only 8,000 of the 110,000 subjects studied were women.