In Partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital: An Evening of Conversation with Maya Dusenbery
In partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital, join us for a conversation with Maya Dusenbery. She will be discussing her book, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick.
A book signing will follow the program.
Admission: Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.
Location:
Folkman Auditorium
Located in the Enders Research Building
320 Longwood Ave
Boston, MA 02115
"Dusenbery's excellent book makes the sexism plaguing women’s health care hard to ignore."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Within an organized, well-balanced combination of scientific and social research and moving personal stories, Dusenbery makes a convincing case for the need for drastic industry reform and clinical refinement."
— Kirkus
About Doing Harm:
In Doing Harm, Maya Dusenbery weaves together scientific and sociological research, interviews with doctors and researchers, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today.
Doing Harm explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women’s experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled "chronic complainers" for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to "normal" menstrual cramps, while still others have "contested" illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as "real" diseases by the whole of the profession.
An eye-opening read for patients and health care providers alike, Doing Harm shows how women suffer because the medical community knows relatively less about their diseases and bodies and too often doesn't trust their reports of their symptoms. The research community has neglected conditions that disproportionately affect women and paid little attention to biological differences between the sexes in everything from drug metabolism to disease risk factors—even the symptoms of a heart attack. Meanwhile, a long history of viewing women as especially prone to "hysteria" reverberates to the present day, leaving women battling against a stereotype that they're hypochondriacs whose ailments are likely to be "all in their heads."
Offering a clear-eyed explanation of the root causes of this insidious and entrenched bias and laying out its sometimes catastrophic consequences, Doing Harm is a rallying wake-up call that will change the way we look at health care for women.
About Maya Dusenbery:
Maya Dusenbery is a journalist and author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, praised by The New York Times Book Review as “well researched [and] wonderfully truculent.” The book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR and Library Journal, and won the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for general nonfiction.
She has spoken widely about gender bias in medicine, with appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air and Good Morning America. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, Slate, Cosmopolitan.com, HuffPost, and Teen Vogue. A former editorial director of Feministing, she previously worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. She holds a B.A. from Carleton College and is based in Portland, Oregon.