Olympia Snowe: “this is National Women's Health Week, and it is certainly fitting to take stock of both our successes in promoting…”

“this is National Women's Health Week, and it is certainly fitting to take stock of both our successes in promoting women's health while looking at the challenges ahead. Historically, women's health care needs have been poorly understood. While the obvious differences between the sexes are indisputable, it was assumed that those differences had limited implications, resulting in women being systematically excluded from health research studies. Too often, only men were studied and considered the health care ``norm'' for both genders. Of course, for a few diseases such as ovarian or breast cancer, the study of women was an absolute requirement. However, for so many others, women were excluded. Sometimes we heard that it would cost more to include women in trials because more participants would need to be enrolled--since research results would need to be analyzed separately for both men and women. That certainly sounds like a recognition that men and women can differ quite substantially. As researchers have looked, they have found so many times where a single difference between the sexes has so many other ramifications for health and disease. For example, because every child is genetically unique and different from both parents, childbearing requires the ability of a woman to have periods of lowered immunity in her reproductive tract.…”