Talk spotlights ills of women’s healthcare

By Rita Walton

Issues around women’s healthcare and evidence-based science brought an engaged audience to the Hastings Public Library to hear Assemblymember MaryJane Shimsky deliver her talk entitled “The Burgeoning Crisis in Women’s Healthcare” on Sunday, March 2. 

The leading cause of death among women is heart disease, but that condition hasn’t been studied for women as extensively as it has for men. According to Shimsky, it was only in the mid-1980s, with the Framingham Heart Study, that the medical community began to realize women’s risk of heart disease had been greatly overlooked. This, the study noted, was partly because women have different symptoms and risk factors than men, and partly because women were underrepresented both as participants in clinical trials and as investigators leading the studies.