The Wrong Prescription for Women: How Medicine and Media Create a "Need" for Treatments, Drugs, and Surgery

This groundbreaking book challenges the medicalized approach to women's experiences including menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause and suggests that there are better ways for women to cope with real issues they may face.Before any woman diets, douches, botoxes, reduces, reconstructs, or fills a prescription for antidepressants, statins, hormones, menstrual suppressants, or diet pills, she should read this book. Contesting common medical practice, the book addresses the many aspects of women's lives that have been targeted as "deficient" in order to support the billion-dollar profits of the medical-pharmacological industry and suggests alternatives to these "remedies."The contributors—psychologists, sociologists, and health experts—are also gender experts and feminist scholars who recognize the ways in which gender is an important aspect of the human experience. In this eye-opening work, they challenge the marketing and "science" that increasingly render women's bodies and experiences as a series of symptoms, diseases, and dysfunctions that require treatment by medical professionals who prescribe pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. Each article in the book addresses the marketing of a specific "condition" that has been constructed in a way that convinces a woman that her body is inadequate or her experience and behavior are not good enough. Among the topics addressed are menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, post-partum adjustment, sexual desire, weight, body dissatisfaction, moodiness, depression, grief, and anxiety.

About the Author

Maureen C. McHugh , PhD, teaches gender and diversity at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). Joan C. Chrisler , PhD, is the Class of 1943 Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College.