Tag: Dr. Sharonne Hayes

Female cardiologists chat about heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Only 7% of the world’s cardiologists are women.  Pity.  In these two videos, you’ll get an opportunity to eavesdrop on some of the best of this elite group as they discuss ‘The Heart of a Woman’.

UPDATE FROM CAROLYN: Sadly, neither of these films are still available. Instead, I invite you to watch a remarkable little film called “A Typical Heart“ (about 22 minutes in length), a documentary exploring the deadly disparity between male and female heart disease, through the lens of healthcare professionals, researchers, patients and their families. I was honoured to be one of the eight female heart patients interviewed for this film. 

♥

The ‘bikini approach’ to women’s health research

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas

We know that, until very recently, cardiac research for the past three decades has been done either exclusively on men, or with women represented in statistically insignificant numbers. Medical researchers have largely taken a ‘bikini approach’ to women’s health care – in which women’s health research focuses on breasts and the reproductive system.

In a recent WomenHeart interview, Mayo Clinic cardiologist Dr. Sharonne Hayes, founder of the Mayo Women’s Heart Clinic in Rochester, MN, explains:

“In the 1960s, erroneous assertions that heart disease was a man’s disease were widely spread to the medical community and to the public.  This led to research almost exclusively focused on cardiovascular disease in men.  Many clinical trials in the 70s and 80s excluded women or simply didn’t make an effort to enroll women in sufficient numbers to draw sex-based conclusions.” Continue reading “The ‘bikini approach’ to women’s health research” →