Review

...and the British version

WOMEN AND THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY
Peggy Foster
Open University Press, 1995

This critical review of several areas of medical care which specifically affect women is both a useful update and a saddening reminder of the inadequate and inappropriate response of medicine to the health concerns of women. Peggy Foster avoids an overly clinical analysis of treatments and focuses instead on the relationship between medicine and profit, between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry and on medicine’s apparent reluctance to abandon stereotypical pictures of women’s lives.

One problem in attempting to discuss several areas of concern is the inevitable gaps in the evidence. Current concerns in breast cancer, for instance, focus on the implications of gene research and the worrying promotion of hormones as preventive agents. Foster gives these only passing reference but the thoroughness of her referencing does at least provide someone wishing to pursue a particular topic in more depth with a good starting point.

I did wonder whether the book might be more accurately titled Women and the medical industry as, apart from an interesting chapter on health promotion, most of the focus is on doctors, who are not the major providers of healthcare in Britain. I am also uneasy with the blanket use of the term ‘feminist’ adopted by some writers who give the impression that they haven’t quite decided whether to claim the title themselves or not. As a (British) feminist with longstanding involvement in women’s health, I find it alienating to read statements such as ‘... British feminists have, on the whole, accepted the dominant medical view of particular interventions’, and ‘most feminists have not... seriously questioned the innate value of cancer screening tests’. This is disappointing for those of us who have consistently challenged the usefulness of mass screening programmes and who have never unquestioningly accepted the medical model of health.

Nevertheless Peggy Foster has certainly written an ideal book for anyone wanting an introduction to the political aspects of women’s health issues.