Medicalization and Psychologisation:
The Need for a Specialty in Women’s Health For centuries, women’s health has been compromised by technologies and practices that stem from outdated androcentric philosophies and theories about women’s reproductive systems and women’s “nature”. Let us consider the following; vulva is from the Latin pudere meaning “to be ashamed of”; estrogen is from the Greek oistros “insane desire”; and hysterectomy is from the Greek hysteria meaning “belonging to the womb”. In today’s day and age, women’s health continues to be threatened by a male dominated medical model of health care. Evidence of this can be found in the medicalization and the psychologisation of women’s health. This essay examines both of these practices and how they relate to the need for a specialty in women’s health. It also suggests how these issues can be mitigated.
The Need for a Specialty in Women’s Health
The more you depend on forces outside of yourself, the more you are dominated by them. Harold Sherman The need for a specialty devoted to women’s health can be attributed to a profound male bias within the medical model of health care that ignores women’s total health needs and therefore threatens their health. Women have often been short changed by medicine when it comes to research, drug trials, the safety of medical products as well as the diagnosing and treatment of their health conditions. Using research as an example, we find that it has traditionally been conducted on men by men and that the findings are then generalized to women (Munch, 2004, p.113). This falsely assumes that women and men are the same in terms of common illnesses and diseases such as heart disease, arthritis and cancer when in fact, the opposite is true. For example, rheumatoid arthritis is three times more likely to occur in women; lung, kidney, bladder and