Historically, the medical system was not designed to prioritize — or many times, even consider — women patients and providers. Dr. Elizabeth Comen wrote the book “All in Her Head,” to examine this troubled history and help educate and empower women to get the healthcare they deserve. Dr. Comen and Dr. Deborah Bartz join us to discuss how to break through the shame and misinformation surrounding women's bodies.
Historically, the medical system was not designed to prioritize — or many times, even consider — women patients and providers. Dr. Elizabeth Comen wrote the book “All in Her Head,” to examine this troubled history and help educate and empower women to get the healthcare they deserve. Dr. Comen and Dr. Deborah Bartz join us to discuss how to break through the shame and misinformation surrounding women's bodies.
This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens.
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Dr. Denise Millstine:Welcome to the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where we explore women's health topics through books. In the same way that books can transport us to a different time, place, or culture, “Read. Talk. Grow.” demonstrates how they can also give us a new appreciation for health experiences.
At “Read. Talk. Grow.,” we use books to learn about health conditions in the hopes that we can all lead happier, healthier lives. I'm your host, Dr. Denise Millstine. I'm an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, where I practice women's health, internal medicine, and integrative medicine. I am always reading and I love talking about books with my patients, my friends, my professional colleagues, and now with you.
Our book today is “All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today.” Our topic today is women's health history and how it impacts the care of women in the modern healthcare system. So excited about my two guests. Dr. Elizabeth Comen has dedicated her medical career to saving the lives of women. She's an award-winning, internationally sought after clinician and physician scientist. Dr. Comen is a medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer. She's an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health. She's a tireless advocate for women's health care. She lives in New York with her family. “All in Her Head” is her first book. Elizabeth, welcome to the show.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Our second guest is Dr. Deborah Bartz. She's an obstetrician-gynecologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. She's currently the medical director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's statewide Title X program, and the director of the Brigham and Women's Ryan Training Program, where she has been innovative in expanding training to include evidence based women's health care. Her current research focuses on the development, assessment, and propagation of best educational practices of women's health curricula. Deb, welcome to the show.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Our book today is “All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today.” This is narrative nonfiction about the history of women's health that carefully includes how the culture, attitude, so-called experts and innovators approached women's lives and bodies, and how that's impacted the care that women receive today, as well as our limited knowledge as health care providers.
Its chapters go through the body, the whole body, which is important when much of women's health has focused on so-called bikini medicine, like breast care, pelvic care, and genitals. Elizabeth, congratulations on your amazing book. It's really incredible and so readable.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: I think what I am so proud of is that it is part of a greater mission that you see in our world today, this real groundswell among women, but also men as well, to value women's health care, to elevate and recognize that there are so many gaps and unmet needs in our health care.
When I sat down to write it, it was really a labor of love, a passion, a calling, something that I had wanted to do for a very long time, but wasn't quite confident that I could include so much of the history that I loved and read about all the time. But I'm not. It's not like I have a PhD in the history of science. I majored in it. But you know, we all have imposter syndrome, and I wasn't certain that I was going to be able to do this from an academic setting, but I was really inspired by so many of the stories that I started to read from the past and felt that if I just shared in firsthand what doctors said about women or what these patients said about themselves, and the stories would write themselves.
Dr. Denise Millstine: And they sure did. I mean, you've made them so approachable. It's really a marvelous read. So glad to have read it. Deb, tell us your reaction to the book.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: Yeah, I certainly enjoyed it. I read it twice and plowed through it and started all over again, which is something that I only do for books that I truly enjoy. But I really liked about this book having read a fair amount about women in society, women's health, and the historical aspect of sex and gender differences, is this book really combines all three.
It demonstrates that we can't necessarily think about women's health, the medical system, as a silo, and separate out the very gendered society in which we live and have historically, to a much greater degree, lived in a space as it related to frank misogyny even. So, this book very nicely blends sex-specific differences as it relates to health. But really a lot of aspects outside of the medical system and what we know about health and disease that contribute to health outcomes from the society that we live within.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: I appreciate that. I would say from an OB-GYN perspective, what's fascinating to me is how much, you know, when I was in medical school, the idea was women's health was really the purview of gynecologists. And it was like vaginas and that's it, right? And babies and that's it. And maybe STD prevention and that's it.
I never learned about menopause, let alone the fact that anybody who goes into medicine, unless you're solely taking care of men, no matter what specialty you go into, if you're caring for women, you are part of women's health. And that was not something baked into the system that I was trained in. And certainly in writing this book, one of the goals was really to show that there are a lot of incredible books on women's health that focus on our reproductive function, or perhaps even our sexual health, although those are less as compared to reproductive function.
But when it comes to just head to toe, how we are not small men, how we present differently with disease, there are female-predominant diseases and how we have not been valued in those spaces, in every organ system was really important for me to show.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: I really appreciated, especially how you, you do include sex, reproduction, but it's very much a later chapter and you lead with a much more holistic framework and a framework embedded within organ systems that historically, as you mentioned, have indeed not been studied, taught, researched, practiced in clinical medicine, as having specific sex-based differences.
With the medical community and honestly, people at large, thinking that there really was not much difference outside of bikini level. You know what we call bikini medicine, where it's just, you know, breasts and reproductive organs and otherwise indeed, where we're more or less the same and the scientific community is, is playing catch up a little bit, but not soon enough and not fast enough. But indeed, having these broader conversations that are very deliberately brought outside of reproduction are incredibly important. So thank you for that.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I think in addition to what you've just said, Deb, we just didn’t, or I'll speak for myself, I'm older than you, Elizabeth, certainly, but it didn't even occur to me that women had been excluded for so long. I made some assumptions that what I was learning had always been applied to women. And it's not until you dig into the studies, and you see how many excluded women, that you realized that we were really operating on a lot of evidence that was based on studying men, which, to your point, is not necessarily something you can extrapolate to caring for a woman.
Let's talk about the beginning of the book. You talk about your clinical practice, which we've said is in breast cancer, and there's a woman who you clearly have a lot of empathy for, your patient who's had cancer, that's been treated and now has reached a stage where it's not going to be treated. Tell the story where as you're sharing with her this news and talking about how you're moving into this next phase of care, you give her a hug and she immediately apologizes for her body. She apologizes for sweating, which who wouldn't be sweating with that news? Why do we do that?
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Oh, I think that there's a long, sordid legacy of women apologizing for themselves. Even in the worst circumstances, their deathbed, even for things that absolutely have nothing to do with in their control, or things that are completely reflective of just normal bodily function. And I think that mirrors a lot of what you see socially and culturally and historically.
And that really drives home the point when we think about how much women apologize in all sorts of spaces. But I really wanted to show this really poignant, tragic moment of a woman dying and still feeling in her subconscious enough shame, enough embarrassment, enough apologetic energy to want to apologize to me for sweating on me when I am there to care for her and maybe she had hours to live.
So I think that it really drives home the point of just how much medicine, scientific discovery, the way we treat bodies, is woven into social ideas, mores, cultural religious beliefs.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Yeah, it's so powerful. We absolutely need to stop apologizing for our bodies. It will be hard to make progress if we don't.
Deb, Elizabeth comments that while women are now attending medical school in greater numbers than men, we remain underrepresented in academic achievements and promotions as well as in research. Is this something you're still seeing?
Dr. Deborah Bartz: Oh my goodness, absolutely. I mean, we're definitely seeing some cool things early on in the pipeline. So I was just at a talk this morning that George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School, was speaking at, and he said that the Harvard Medical School admission is up to 60% females. So huge strides that have been made, certainly over the last couple decades.
But absolutely, as people move through their professional path, it is slowed, sluggish for a whole host of reasons. We talk about a leaky pipeline. What I actually see is, and this has been written about a bit, is more of a plugged pipeline where leadership positions that have historically been bestowed on certain folks, as opposed to going through more equitable search pathways, have resulted in a leadership structure that does, despite the fact that our younger generation is now a higher representation of female, we're not seeing that in upper and upper and upper echelons of leadership.
And what I think could really rectify that is people very deliberately starting to think about term limits as it relates to various leadership positions. To allow greater movement through the pipeline so that we can overcome historical inequities that have affected sex, that have affected race and other identities that people hold. And not only will it allow people to go through the promotion process faster, it actually would be more beneficial for the people that are sitting in those positions at the moment to actually move on to something bigger, better to give in a greater capacity than the current position that they're currently sitting in. To actually leverage that leadership for something new or better.
And then it also would address issues surrounding burnout, which is a big factor and particularly a big factor for women in the profession; in that if you do have a pathway into leadership, if you can see yourself moving forward into a leadership position, there's reason to think that you would therefore have greater investment, engagement, commitment within the mission of your organization, essentially. So we have a ways to go, but there are solutions.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I love how you answered that question with a sigh and then pivoted to hope and strategies for improvement. Thanks for talking about it that way.
Elizabeth, in one of your early chapters, you talk about cosmetic elective plastic surgery versus reconstructive plastic surgery, the latter being something you help your patients navigate after they've had breast cancer treatment.
In your book, you say 100 years of advancement has done nothing to resolve the tension surrounding cosmetic surgery. On the one hand, we imagine that women are empowered by the ability to change the way they look, except that this empowerment takes the form of complete and utter submission, essentially, to typically a man and whose hands she's turning her body to be made more beautiful in the sense of what he perceives is the beauty standard.
Where is that tension and why does it continue to exist? Can you speak to it?
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: I can certainly speak to that. And it actually dovetails in a way I can't fully articulate but I'm going to try to what Deb was saying earlier. When we talk about the evolution of women in medicine as caregivers, as doctors, it's one thing for…You know I went to Harvard Med School. There were over 50% of the graduates were women then. It doesn't mean, as Deb said, that we're doing any better now.
It also has to be the type of spirit that is allowed to hold those positions of leadership. It's not enough to just say, oh, we have a female CEO or we have a female chair, we have a female leader, right? It is. What is the energy behind that leadership?
Because in many ways we're talking about feminine characteristics, masculine characteristics, which all get blurred. But if a position of leadership has to look historically like everybody looked before, whether you're born a man or a female, we haven't actually enhanced the diversity of spirits that can be leaders.
And when you look at what burned out women so much in medicine, it's this idea that we listen longer, we spend longer with patients; we answer more portal messages. If you're a female patient and you're operated on by a woman, you do better. That shouldn't be the case. It should be regardless of whether you're a man or a woman. What are the things that are allowing women to be more empathic and listen longer to patients, but not necessarily get more promoted?
What if we also promoted those women that are the quote, unquote, “mom consults” that in every specialty that I interviewed, every woman said some version of, I am asked to be the mom consult, the one that will listen longer, hold hands longer, and show that empathy. Those are historically not the types of doctors, whether they're men or women, that get promoted to positions of leadership.
So how does that relate to cosmetic and all of that? Well, what does it mean to look more feminine? What does it mean to act more? I mean that I'm really going off the rails with this one, but it angers me a little bit because there have been many times in medicine, when we're talking about cosmetic and vanity, where I was told, wear your glasses when you're on TV, don't wear your hair down, wear this type of dress, speak with this type of tone because it had more masculine energy.
And in so much of writing this book, people expected me to kind of have this idea that if we just flood the system with more women, it's going to be better. No, they're amazing men that can be empathic, they're amazing women that can do a terrible job.
So how does this relate to cosmetics and all of that? It relates to the diversity of looks and spirits and energy that can show up at work. Because cosmetic and plastic surgery is not just about the things that we do to ourselves, it's also about how we feel about ourselves, how we conduct ourselves in spaces. Right? What are you allowed to wear? I mean, there are plenty of doctors who have said to me, I get judged for my dreadlocks or I get judged for wearing lipstick, or I get judged for wearing my hair down. We have to be able to accept different types of views and esthetics in medicine that reflect the diversity of the population that we treat.
So that was a bit of a digression, but when it comes to the history of plastic surgery, yes, historically this was male surgeons operating on female healthy patients who wanted to look a certain way that mirrored whatever the societal pressures were today.
I'm the first one to say, if you want your Botox, if you want your filler, I'm not here to judge that, you want breast implants. If that's what makes you feel good, great. I am not somebody who would say that's a bad idea. I would just say understanding the history and understanding the social pressures allows you to really say, who am I doing this for? How do I want to feel better? Will this make me feel better because of some pressure that I just am never going to satisfy? Or you know, have I had kids and I breastfed, I look, I breastfed three kids myself and would I feel better if I had breast implants? Maybe, I don't know, but if some women feel that way, I think that we have to honor that and respect that and understand that so many of the women that are going to seek cosmetic and plastic surgery interventions are often doing it in a setting where it is a male gaze that is deciding what they should and should not look like, and also deciding the options that they have.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I wasn't sure how you were going to connect the two as well, but you did a brilliant job. Thank you.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: I don't know that I did. I mean, it all seems related. It all seems related, right? Are you allowed to be a doctor and wear lipstick? Are you allowed to be powerful and want a tummy tuck? I mean, yes, you are. Right, but who are the people that are the arbiters of that power dynamic and making sure that you are equally having agency in those conversations and in that dynamic, whether it's a position of leadership or whether you're a patient on an operating table, anesthetized.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: Yeah, I took a…I'm sure you probably did too, Elizabeth…we take these multiple leadership courses and one leadership course I took was like, “Women in Leadership.” And so much of what that course was, was essentially teaching us how to be and act like men. Essentially like how to be more aggressive, how to be more assertive, how to speak with greater authority, this, that and the other. And it was so disappointing. Because I actually find great fulfillment, enjoyment and empowerment in my female-specific behaviors that I actually think are superior to some of these overly assertive gentlemen that have historically been in some leadership positions. Even hearing the conversation about Elizabeth's patient apologizing for sweating. And I hear it all the time, as a gynecologist, I get, I'm so sorry I didn't shave. You know, that's such a common refrain that I wish I had a cross-stitch on my wall, I don't care if you didn't shave. Just to like thwart that conversation from the get go.
But I actually do think that there's something so perfect, in how many women, including women patients and women doctors, which Elizabeth brought up, are much more nurturing and community-based, where we're not so self-absorbed that we actually are cognizant of the people around us and how we're making those people feel and what have you. And so all this to say is, I think there is a great empowerment in femininity and celebrating femininity. And if indeed that empowerment comes from owning how you uptake or consume the wellness market or the plastic surgery market or what have you. I think that can be quite beneficial.
The problem is, is that females in the world in general, certainly working females and certainly working females within medicine, there is such a fine line between likable and competent. And sometimes, that we're walking every day, and sometimes that tightrope is like nonexistent. Like you have to choose, am I going to be likable today or am I going to be competent in this meeting? You project competence. So it is a choice that some of us really have to navigate with some regularity that I think our male partners don't even think about.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: So, Deb, I was laughing to myself because I'm very proud to be at NYU and I have been recruited there for a leadership position. But prior to that, I was at the same hospital that I trained in fellowship at and built my career at, and I never was invited to a single leadership, any sort of program, because I don't think I fit that model to your point. I don't even think they tried. It's like she's just going to hug everybody and that's going to be a problem.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: I would love a leadership. The men are never invited to these leadership courses in order to, like, adjust their behavior, to take on what I think are superior traits for team connection, team building, team management, etc. that women hold. And so I would love to see a leadership development course that is like, how to be a leader in a diverse work environment that really celebrates what women positioning and behaviors brings to improved organizational function.
Dr. Denise Millstine: We actually have a leadership training program at Mayo Clinic that my colleague, Dr. Cynthia Stonnington is conducting, that's kindness-centered leadership or wellness-centered leadership. And that sounds really soft, but it's not. It's a lot of what you're talking about. And it's for everybody and includes topics like diversity and well-being, of course.
Okay Deb, let's shift to an area of the body that is part of your clinical practice. So in the bladder chapter, Elizabeth talks about the legacy of the gynecologists who focused on the often ignored female urinary tract. She says, when a medical field goes under discussed and unexamined the way women's urology has, the resulting knowledge vacuum attracts all sorts of peculiar theories to fill it and peculiar people to go with them. Do you think this history has impacted the field of urogynecology? So for our listeners, the overlap of gynecology with the urinary system and women's willingness to discuss incontinence and related issues in our modern world.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: So I'm going to say that the urinary chapter was my favorite chapter. I absolutely loved it. I don't know if that's because I'm 48 and on the precipice of menopause here, but absolutely, hands down, this chapter really resonated with me just as a person outside of gynecology at baseline, but definitely as a gynecologist, just really recognizing how urology has been so predominantly developed as a male-specific specialty with a complete ignoring, a complete lack of gaze to female urology at all. And urogynecologyhas picked up the torch a bit, but it's not a substitute for a whole discipline. And with, you know, what is their residency, for five years? Not to mention the fact that if you look at these urology procedures performed by urologists for men, they can bill a different billing code that's reimbursed to a much greater degree than the same procedure with a different billing code that's specific to females.
So it really is problematic. What ends up happening from a professionalism standpoint is we do know that medicine, just like every other discipline, has a lack of gender parity and payment at baseline. So female positions get paid less just for being a female physician. But any physician who takes care of women ends up with these lower reimbursed billing codes. So women taking care of women have this like double jeopardy as it relates to lower payment, essentially for taking care of females.
So it makes it hard to attract outstanding talent into these fields, right? If you're automatically discriminated against in the workplace at baseline. It’s the same with funding, funding issues for research, women's health research is woefully underfunded. Luckily, Dr. Biden of the Biden administration, is working to offset that a bit. but as our other initiatives. But there's just not the funding and specifically funding for women in urology, that is huge.
And if we just look at what is urology largely a practice of, it's now become largely a practice of erectile dysfunction. Right. So how many male-based erectile dysfunction medications are there? Last I knew, there were just under 30. Huge booming conversation and consumer market. How many are there for women to treat sexual satisfaction and dysfunction? I think there's one FDA-approved option and that one is highly problematic. It has side effects that are really concerning. And there's just hasn't been the funding. There just hasn't been the scientific interest to look into. There would be a huge market. I don't, I would think that companies would be of interest, but it's just a total myopia to women's urology, women’s sexual function. So that chapter was phenomenal.
And I have to say, so I was recently just at a curriculum committee meeting for the MIT portion of our medical school, and they had a urology day and they called it male urology. And I absolutely, after reading this book, I held this book up at the meeting, and I told them about this book and how historically female have been underrepresented and I think they were using it as this course topic, male urology as a way to counter the reproductive contents that they otherwise had, so that they could say that they were giving equal space to men versus women. But they're absolutely changing it this next year, based on my reading of this book and bringing it to that committee.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Thank you for that.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Changing lives, Elizabeth. Lots and lots of lives, including in medical education.
We have to talk about menopause, absolutely. So, Elizabeth, you take readers through the history of discovering sex hormones and the early insistence that there were male hormones like testosterone, female hormones like estrogen, that we now know are present in both sexes and all people in varying amounts and concentrations.
Can you talk about how menopause historically has been treated as a disease, where I would argue if you take care of women long enough, all of them will go through menopause. So it's really more a phase of life. And the swinging pendulum of giving every woman who goes through menopause and estrogen at her transition, then cutting off that practice abruptly with the Women's Health Initiative. And now, how we're finding our way to determine who benefits from hormone therapy, from menopausal hormone therapy and how.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Yeah, I mean, I think you would almost be better if historically it were treated as a disease. I think it was at best entirely ignored. And then we were I think there was one doctor that, you know, referred to us as like vapid cows or something in Feminine Forever.* And he was supposedly advocating for helping women through this process.
I think it's really just, again, mirrors this idea that we are useless when we age. Right? It mirrors this idea that we are damned when we have fluctuating hormones, and then when we lose certain amounts of estrogen, we go through menopause. Our God-given function of reproduction is no longer available to us and we become useless. And if you look at how we care for women throughout the ages, that is really what happened.
I think about Alzheimer's disease or diseases of aging, like the fact that Alzheimer's disease is two times more common among women in men. And yet we are really behind in how, not just that treatment for it, but how we as a society care for this rising group of largely women who are suffering from substantial cognitive decline and need caregivers.
With respect to menopause, I didn't learn anything about it in medical school. Literally. I don't remember a lecture. I don't remember a seminar. I just remember this is what happens and that's it. And we know now that there are so many different ways that it can affect a woman and can be treated. And it's not just with hormone replacement therapy, but it's with having conversations with women about what they are experiencing. Because with any other presentation of anything in life, medical or otherwise, it's completely unique to the individual. Some women may have hot flashes. Someone may have decreased libido or vaginal dryness. Other women may have issues with bone density changes. All of this needs to be addressed on a personal level, and historically, we did nothing. Then we had this rise of “give everybody hormone replacement therapy.” Then we had the Women's Health Initiative that was very biased toward saying every woman is going to get breast cancer if they take hormone replacement therapy, which is how I was trained and was certainly at the forefront of the discussion as a breast oncologist, no one could ever do this. To now really, this immense movement among society. You see celebrities talking about it, you see companies talking about it, and greater investment into understanding not just how menopause affects a woman from a reproductive standpoint or hormonal standpoint, but head to toe how they can present differently. And I think that's a good thing. But we have a lot to catch up on.
Dr. Denise Millstine: We have a lot, and it's such a complicated topic. So thank you for addressing that and for bringing it to light in your book.
So let's close by talking about ways that early medicine taught us about women's body matters today. Let's focus on that “matters today.” What would each of you say are a couple of the largest areas of impact that this history has come to determine how we treat women in the health care system?
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Well, I would say two things. One, I think the reason why I wanted to incorporate history and narrative medicine is because I think the experience of illness is not lab tests or X-rays or CAT scans or objective signs, but how we experience ourselves in our bodies.
And in this way, so much of how we've been taught, including today, myself, was through shame and apologizing. Right? There are so many women, Deb, you're a gynecologist. How many women have ever taken a mirror and looked at their anatomy? Or can a name the structures of their vulva? Many women cannot, and that's a huge problem. So I think when we think about going all the way back to the Greeks and the history of hysteria, or the ways that, you know, masturbation causes everything from scoliosis to asthma, historically, if you ask doctors, that's baked into the system today when we show up and we try to advocate for the things that concern us.
So I would say that if we can strip away this legacy that has disempowered us, and also for many of us, given shame about our bodies or feeling like we don't have value enough to ask for what we want, though we may be scheduling everybody else's appointments for checkups. Are we doing that for ourselves? And that is what I would hope this book is part of, a greater mission to empower women.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Thank you.
Dr. Deborah Bartz: I love the historical aspect. I love the deep dive that Elizabeth has done in helping us understand the complexity of these characters. There's a lot of nefarious aspects of some of these characters. They're heavily flawed. They're very much a product of the society that they lived within. But some of these nefarious characters also are the only people who are, like, investigating some of these things as well, and actually drawing attention to a field of women's health and women's specific differences in treatment and women. It's unfortunate that they went about it sometimes in the way that they did. It's not black and white, good and bad. There is like a huge amount of gray as it relates to who these historical people are. And Elizabeth very nicely captures that nuance.
You know, I think that we've historically had health, and then we recognize that women's health needs to be different in some capacities than what we've historically learned about as it relates to health. So then this little like subsidiary side discipline of medicine called women's health has like cropped up. That's problematic. It's problematic for multiple reasons. If we take like women's cardiovascular disease, for example. So we come to recognize in the last 20 years that women experience heart disease to a great extent, but the way that they experience it is quite a bit different than how men do. And the naming of the constellation of symptoms as it relates to what women feel as compared to the very classic substernal pressure pain that radiates down the arm. Instead, female symptoms are called atypical. These are atypical cardiovascular symptoms, and that in and of itself demonstrates that we’re this subsidiary, we’re the sidecar of medicine essentially, and that there is heart disease and then there's a typical, you know, symptoms of heart disease. So what we need to do is somehow ask and bring everybody into the conversation. All disciplines, all physicians, not just those that practice women's health currently. And make sure that this becomes just a part of standard medicine, standard medical education, as opposed to the side club that only a few of us are participating in.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I love that answer and I've loved this conversation. I want to thank you both for being with me today on “Read. Talk. Grow.” We could have talked about “All in Her Head” all day long. So listeners are encouraged to go out and read this really remarkable book. Thank you both.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen: Thank you for your time.
Dr. Denise Millstine: “Read. Talk. Grow.” is a product of the Women's Health Center at Mayo Clinic. This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens. Our producer is Lisa Speckhard-Pasque and our recording engineer is Rick Andresen.
Visit our show notes to see the books discussed today and for links to other health education materials. Follow us on social media like Instagram and Facebook, or reach out directly to our email readtalkgrow@mayo.edu with suggestions for books or topic ideas. We'd love to hear from you.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not designed to replace a physician's medical assessment and judgment. Information presented should not be relied on as medical advice. Please contact a health care professional for medical assistance if needed for questions pertaining to your own health. Keep reading everyone!
*Robert A. Wilson, M.D., who wrote Feminine Forever, referred to women acquiring a “vapid cow-like state” in a separate article, not Feminine Forever.