In new book, oncologist explains how gender bias in medicine impacts women’s health
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Elizabeth A. Comen, MD, majored in the history of science as an undergrad at Harvard University, which ignited her fascination with how the experience of illness and history is influenced by culture, religion, society and family narratives.
Years later, Comen became a breast oncologist, and in caring for thousands of women during the span of her career, could grasp their personal experience with the health care system.
The culmination of those experiences led to the production of All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today — a collective overview of women’s bodies and a call to action for new conversations around women’s health. The book, published by HarperCollins, came out in February.
Comen, a breast oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, spoke with Healio about why she wanted to write this book, what readers can glean from it, her advice for other women in medicine who may be interested in writing a book and her future endeavors.
Healio: What inspired you to write this book?
Comen: I have been lucky enough to have extraordinary relationships and sacred conversations with patients over the span of my career. In that, I felt motivated to better understand the legacy that shows up in doctor’s offices and what really holds women back from accessing their best health.
Healio: What can readers expect from the book?
Comen: The book is a walk-through of women’s bodies by organ system — the same organ systems doctors learn about in medical school and the same specialties we are all familiar with today, like cardiology, gastroenterology and neurology. In each of those chapters, I walk women through their body, through the female-specific diseases that have been present in women throughout history. I reference stories throughout history, whether from Ancient Greece or of patients in my clinic today, to highlight what we are missing with respect to women’s health care — who has written about us and what have we missed along the way?
A lot of people have the misconception that the book is a warring faction between male and female doctors — it certainly is not that at all. Part of writing this book was to understand the bias that I feel in my own practice that’s been baked into the system without us even knowing it. The stories from the past are egregious and dramatic.
For female oncologists, these stories may resonate with their own experience in medicine, becoming doctors in a system that may have neglected or mistreated women along the way, and also gives us insight into how we can better care for our patients.
Healio: What advice can you offer other women in oncology who may want to write a book while practicing medicine, taking care of a family, etc.?
Comen: Writing this book gave me life. We all know about burnout and how much that can affect our practice, our lives, our internal path and journey. Oncology is an extremely demanding field that requires tremendous empathy.
For me, I have felt an emotional toll from being an oncologist. Writing this book reinvigorated my love for medicine and allowed me to explore other aspects of our health care system that I haven’t thought about since medical school. It was such a privilege to talk to women across other specialties and learn from their experiences.
I encourage anyone who has a dream to figure out how they might be able to execute it and don’t hold back. Today is the first day of the rest of our lives. We tell our patients that. We fight for our patients to thrive in their lives, and we should fight for each other to have those same incredible experiences.
While writing this book, I ended up working part time for a year, scaling back on clinic. I still saw patients but made some choices in my life that allowed me to have more freedom to write this book that were definitely against the grain, but were ultimately worth it for me.
Healio: Do you have plans to write more books?
Comen: Absolutely. Writing this book was one of the greatest experiences of my life. People have said to me recently, “Oh my gosh, it must be so hard to write a book.” But you know what? It’s hard to take care of patients with cancer, to see incredible people suffer from a horrible disease. Writing a book was joyful and such an incredible time in my life. If anyone has any interest in it, I highly suggest they pursue it.
For more information:
Elizabeth A. Comen, MD, can be reached at comene@mskcc.org.
Collapse
Healio Interviews
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts