Terveydenhoitokulujen jakaantuminen - feministien myytit

Carey Roberts:

Throughout his life, the American male is relentlessly stalked by the Grim Reaper.

In his late teens, car accidents, suicides, and homicides claim three times more male victims than females. Beginning in their 30s, men must face the scourge of heart disease. In their 50s and 60s, it's the looming specter of cancer. And men's overall suicide rate is four times higher than among women.

It's a public health disaster of epic proportions: For every one of the top 10 leading causes of death, men have a higher risk of death than women.

The litany of women's health programs reveals a gender agenda run amok:

1. The Department of Health and Human Services sponsors five offices of women´s health, but has no office designed to help men.

2. The National Institutes of Health spends three times more money on breast cancer research than for prostate cancer

3. NIH-funded research studies included only 31% male subjects in 2001, which violates a 1994 Congressional mandate to include both sexes equally in medical research.

4. Last year the DHHS launched a campaign to educate women about heart disease, while men's risk of dying of heart disease is 70% higher than women´s.

How did this topsy-turvy situation arise?

Beginning in the early 1990s, feminist politicians like Pat Schroeder of Colorado and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland began to spread the rumor that women had been routinely excluded from medical research. Shrill headlines began to fill the New York Times and the women's magazines. Soon everyone was believing the story, since everyone knows that feminists never tell a lie.

But the claim that women were shortchanged by medical research turns out to be one of the biggest deceptions ever foisted on an unsuspecting American public.

Sally Satel:

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."