How did you become interested in women’s heart health?In the first few months of my being an attending physician, I was making rounds in the coronary care unit of my hospital. A woman I recognized as an employee at the hospital was a patient there and she mentioned she had been to a range of doctors who told her things like “you’re stressed out, take a vacation.” One gave her a prescription for Valium.
I told him she got on the treadmill, she became symptomatic, the EKG was abnormal, she’s overweight and has a high-stress job. She was Black, she was a single mother — all of the things that people hopefully now recognize put you at high risk for heart disease — and it was a struggle to convince him.
A lot of the information about women and heart disease was actually in nursing medical journals because nurses were recognizing that women had a harder time in their recovery after bypass surgery or heart attack symptoms.Women and their symptoms are often ignored in the healthcare field.Somehow, we have to get this to stop. It’s really destructive. And oftentimes, qualities are attributed to women like they’re hysterical, they’re melodramatic, being a drama queen, mentally ill.
That was also around the time I started writing my first book, “Women Are Not Small Men,” which was published in February 2002. That also stimulated more research, recognizing that this was a thing. I think when my book came out, doctors and researchers were caught by surprise. But whatever happened, it did stimulate a lot of research. One of my roles in this whole campaign is that I got people to talk about it.Dr. Goldberg: