Communicating Women S Health

This volume explores the conditions under which women are empowered, and feel entitled, to make the health decisions that are best for them. At its core, it illuminates how the most basic element of communication, voice, has been summarily suppressed for entire groups of women when it comes to control of their own sexuality, reproductive lives, and health. By giving voice to these women’s experiences, the book shines a light on ways to improve health communication for women. Bringing together personal narratives, key theory and literature, and original qualitative and quantitative studies, the book provides an in-depth comparative picture of how and why women’s health varies for distinct groups of women. Organized into four parts—historical influences on patient and provider perceptions, breast cancer the silence and the shame, make it taboo: mothering, reproduction, and womanhood, and sex, sexuality, relational health, and womanhood—each section is introduced with a brief synthesis and discussion of the key questions addressed across the chapters.

Women’s Health Advocacy brings together academic studies and personal narratives to demonstrate how women use a variety of arguments, forms of writing, and communication strategies to effect change in a health system that is not only often difficult to participate in, but which can be actively harmful. It explicates the concept of rhetorical ingenuity—the creation of rhetorical means for specific and technical, yet extremely personal, situations. At a time when women’s health concerns are at the center of national debate, this rhetorical ingenuity provides means for women to uncover latent sources of oppression in women’s health and medicine and to influence matters of research, funding, policy, and everyday access to healthcare in the face of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This accessible collection will be inspiring reading for academics and students in health communication, medical humanities, and women’s studies, as well as for activists, patients, and professionals.

Even though slightly over half of the U.S. population is female, medical research historically has neglected the health needs of women. However, over the past two decades, there have been major changes in government support of women's health research-in policies, regulations, and the organization of research efforts. To assess the impact of these changes, Congress directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ask the IOM to examine what has been learned from that research and how well it has been put into practice as well as communicated to both providers and women. Women's Health Research finds that women's health research has contributed to significant progress over the past 20 years in lessening the burden of disease and reducing deaths from some conditions, while other conditions have seen only moderate change or even little or no change. Gaps remain, both in research areas and in the application of results to benefit women in general and across multiple population groups. Given the many and significant roles women play in our society, maintaining support for women's health research and enhancing its impact are not only in the interest of women, they are in the interest of us all.

Communicating Intimate Health offers a collection of original research and theoretical work showcasing advances in intimate health scholarship from the field of communication studies, with a focus on the intersection of intimate health, gender, and race.

Health Communication and Breast Cancer among Black Women: Cancer, Identity, Spirituality, and Strength analyzes information collected from focus groups and personal interviews in order to investigate the significant sociocultural narratives that pervade the experiences of Black female breast cancer survivors.

Reproductive Justice and Women's Voices: Health Communication across the Lifespan contributes to patient-centered public health by analyzing women’s reproductive health across the lifespan. Sundstrom explicates women’s understandings of control and embodiment in the context of technology.

Pregnancy Narratives examines the stories of women who undergo complications during the reproductive process such as difficult conception, miscarriage, still birth, premature labor, and premature delivery. Hall calls attention to how the stories of pregnancy and birth that women hear prior to their pregnancy shape the narratives they later tell of their own traumatic experiences.

In the 1960s, feminists voiced their outrage about the health care system in the United States which routinely discriminated against women and, in so doing, literally jeopardized their health and well-being. Over a decade later, women's health advocates still stressed the need for reform of this male-dominated institution because of the on-going threat to the health of American women. In the 1990s, nearly 40 years after women began their fight for quality and equitable treatment from the medical profession, women unfortunately continue to confront problems on numerous levels including discrimination in medical research and in the availability of insurance and health care providers. Most alarming, however, is the fact that women today--like women in the '60s and before--lack information, understanding, and adequate diagnoses and treatment from their health caregivers. This book extends from a program of research on women's health issues by the authors. More than 150 audio-taped, naturally occurring interactions between health caregivers and their female patients from three different health care settings--as well as ethnographic field notes in three additional settings which provide health care to women-- constitute the data for this investigation. They explore the consequentiality of relational issues during women's health care encounters and examine how health care participants save face, enact roles, co-construct their encounters, and accomplish the objective of education and medical care. Unlike earlier works, this study utilizes an extensive data collection derived directly from hundreds of interactions between health care providers and their patients, as opposed to surveys or case studies of singular practitioners. The authors examine the data in light of insights from a variety of theoretical perspectives and are committed to exploring the implication that medical encounters are collaboratively managed by both patients and caregivers. Given these theoretical and empirical contributions, the authors believe this book will advance present understanding in the areas of health and relational communication, women's health care, gender issues in communication, conversation analysis, discourse processes, and institutional talk.