Countywide : Doctor to Speak on Women in Medicine

When Dr. Marjorie Braude was a medical student applying for her residency, five of eight Chicago hospitals refused to consider her because she was a woman, and a married one at that.

Before one hospital finally accepted her, she said, “I had to swear before this all-male committee that I was going to use birth control and I was not going to get pregnant as an intern.”

That was in 1950, but the experience sparked Braude’s lifelong interest in promoting women in health care.

On Thursday, Braude, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, will discuss advances by women physicians at a meeting sponsored by the American Assn. of University Women in Thousand Oaks.

The meeting will be at 7 p.m. at the Newbury Park Branch Library, 2331 Borchard Road. The public is invited, but space is limited, so people are asked to register in advance by calling 494-6596 or 492-7551.

Braude said there have been “rapid and dramatic changes” by women doctors. She said it has only been within the last 20 years, for instance, that the first women were allowed in the surgery and gynecology programs at UCLA’s medical school.

Now UCLA has a new Breast Center, run by a woman surgeon who is a nationally known breast cancer expert.

Recent controversies over gender equity in health care have focused on the tendency of medical research to ignore women as subjects.

A well-known study concluded that an aspirin every other day could help prevent heart attacks. But all the research subjects were men.

Another study that found a possible relationship between caffeine and heart disease was based on 45,598 research subjects--all of them men.

According to an article last year in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., men were more likely than women to be referred for further testing given similar evidence of possible heart disease, and doctors were twice as likely to attribute women’s symptoms to psychiatric or other causes unrelated to the heart.

“Major studies have not included women, so women in their middle years have a major quandary in assessing health-care choices available to them,” Braude said.