women's health

Let’s Keep Politicians Out Of Reproductive Health Choices

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Several times every month, protesters come to the New Haven Planned Parenthood of Southern New England office to hold signs and pray the rosary. Planned Parenthood serves about 64,000 Connecticut patients a year, though according to a recent annual report, abortions are only about six percent of its services. Most of the services revolve around providing contraceptive services and testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Last month, the federal Food and Drug Administration eased restrictions on the so-called abortion pill, also known as RU-486. The new rules allow women to use the drug later in their pregnancies with less visits to the doctor.

Disparities

Ministering To Diabetics From The Pulpit

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For more than 20 years, the Citadel of Love, a Pentecostal church, has anchored one of Hartford’s most economically-challenged neighborhoods in the city’s North End. In its outreach ministries, the church offers clothing giveaways and free meals. Under the leadership of Pastor Marichal Monts, a Hartford native who grew up just down the street, a church committee met recently to discuss some of the flock’s health challenges. Many of the members come from the area, where the U.S. Census says the median household income is just $20,434. (Compare that to the state’s median household income that hovers around $70,000.)

High on the list of health challenges discussed by the leaders was Type 2 diabetes, which was once called adult-onset diabetes.

Women's Health

What To Watch In Health Care In 2016

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As we open the book on 2016, here are a few things to watch for in the field of women’s health and well-being. In no particular order, from the Office of Healthcare Prognostication—a department I just made up—comes these predictions for the new year:

1 • The use of mobile health apps, or so-called “health wearables,” will increase, according to the American College of Sports Medicine’s 10th annual survey on fitness trends. Already, the adoption of smartphone health apps has doubled in the last two years, from 16 percent in 2013 to 32 percent of consumers saying they have at least one health app on their mobile device. 2 • Beyond measuring one’s fitness, health care in general will begin a “shift into the palms of consumers’ hands,” according to PwC’s 2015 Health Research Institute’s annual report. It’s happening already in primary care and the management of some chronic diseases, though programs such as Omada Health’s online program called Prevent are pushing into fields such as behavior modification.

Women's Health

Rise In Pregnancy-Related Deaths Is Shameful

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About 650 U.S. women die each year during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after giving birth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Compared to other countries – and not just newly developing ones – that figure is abysmal. In fact, according to a new study from the World Health Organization and others, the U.S. is one of just 13 countries where the maternal mortality rate has actually risen between 1990 and 2013. Other countries on that list include North Korea and Zimbabwe. The gross domestic product of Zimbabwe is $13.5 billion.

Men's Health

It’s Time To Give Men More Birth Control Choices

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For all of recorded history, the contraceptive of choice for men—short of sterilization, withdrawal or abstinence—has been the condom. How ubiquitous are condoms? The federal government says 18 billion condoms will be used worldwide this year alone. They’re sold in latex, lambskin (good for pregnancy prevention, not good for prevention of STDs or HIV), and ribbed with something called “tattoo-inspired textures.”

The choices are dizzying, but only within an extremely small field that involves placing an expandable sheath over an erect penis. Not a single new form of male contraceptives has been introduced on the market in this century—or the last.

Women's Health

New Breast Cancer Screening Guidelines Rekindle Rage, Debate

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When the American Cancer Society announced new guidelines for mammograms a week ago, the response on the organization’s Facebook page was swift. “For adoptees, this just adds 5 more years of potential unknowing,” wrote Angela from Connecticut. “Without a medical history, we are denied mammograms through insurance carriers.”

And then Dr. Henry Jacobs, a Hartford area longtime OB-GYN who, among other duties, serves as the Connecticut State Medical Society president, took to Facebook, too, and posted a message that summarized the general rage: “It is clear that rationing care is the new sales pitch and sacrificing women that could live out their lives is considered acceptable. I think it is UNCONSCIONABLE!!!!!!! We can afford athletes, entertainers, CEOs, hedge fund scammers that make upwards of a 100 million $$$$$ a year, but we can’t provide decent medical care to people???

Women's Health

Change The Law That Allows Gun Rights To Trump Protective Orders

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In 2014, Lori Jackson Gellatly was shot and killed by her estranged husband, after she had moved from the family’s home with the couple’s twin toddlers to her mother’s house in Oxford. Lori Gellatly had filed for and obtained a temporary restraining order because she said her husband was abusive. She was just a day shy of a hearing for a permanent order against her husband, who also seriously wounded Lori Gellatly’s mother. Lori Gellatly’s husband (I am tired of naming shooters) has since pleaded guilty to charges of murder and attempted murder, and he’s due back in court in November for what could be a 45-year sentence. Lori Gellatly died during what advocates and researchers say is a particularly vulnerable time, when an accused offender could react violently to being subject to a temporary restraining order.

Disparities

An Ode To Obamacare And Preventive Health Services

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In Hartford around the time of the Revolutionary War, one Dr. William Jepson owned a home near where South Church stands now. The doctor was better known as an apothecary, as a nod to his main function of dispensing medicine, but for the most part in those days health care was delivered by the women of the family. Only when herbs and home remedies didn’t work were “bone-setters,” or surgeons and physicians such as Jepson, summoned. Treatment might involve bloodletting, which is exactly as it sounds. Preventive care—the standard for today’s medicine—has a spotty history in this country.

Disparities

Teenage Girls Who Exercise Lower Their Risk Of Cancer And Heart Disease In Middle Age

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Ayesha Clarke, of Hartford, ran track in middle and high school. She was a sprinter, and especially enjoyed relay races. She also ran track in the Junior Olympics. Clarke is 31 now, an auditor with the state Department of Revenue Services, and the mother of two children, ages 4 and 3. Like many young mothers her age, she doesn’t exercise as much as she used to, but she has noticed a difference between women who exercised as teenagers, and women who didn’t.

Carolyn Treiss

Gender Pay Gap Extends Into Retirement For Women

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The gender wage gap has existed as long as women have been in the workplace, and despite legislation through the years — 1963’s Equal Pay Act, and 2009’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act – the gap doesn’t seem to be closing. That is unfair and wrong, and damaging to far more than the female employees earning smaller paychecks than their male peers. More and more, families rely on the female wage earners for necessities. What’s worse, in a few years, the gap is going to hit everyone where it hurts – in the pocketbook in the form of increased taxes needed to pay for public services for baby boomer women (like me, and thank you for your contribution) who may not be able to make ends meet living on smaller pensions and/or Social Security benefits. So now is as good a time as any to practice a little math.