Articles: disease.
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Social science & medicine · Jan 1984
Comparative StudyGender differences in mental and physical illness: the effects of fixed roles and nurturant roles.
A decade ago it was widely assumed that there were no gender differences in mental illness/mental health and that any evidence that suggested that women experienced more psychological distress than men was due to women being more willing to admit to psychological distress, being more willing to seek treatment and/or sex bias on the part of clinicians. Furthermore, although it was widely recognized that on most indicators of physical illness women appeared to have higher rates of morbidity, it was generally assumed that the apparent higher rates of women did not reflect real differences in morbidity, but gender differences in illness behavior. A survey of the recent literature, however, shows that there is now a general consensus among social scientists that women experience more psychological distress than men and that this is largely due to aspects of their societal roles. ⋯ It is argued that highly structured or 'fixed' roles tend to be causally related to good mental health and low rates of morbidity. In contrast nurturant roles tend to impose a strain and to impair one's ability to effectively adopt a sick role and as a consequence nurturant roles are linked to poor mental health and the higher rates of morbidity. In short, it is suggested that the fixed role-hypothesis and the nurturant role hypothesis complement each other and together partially explain the higher rates of physical illness and psychological distress among women.
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Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand · Jan 1984
Comparative StudyInduced abortion by the suction method. An analysis of complication rates.
3036 induced abortions from the years 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 were analysed. They included all abortions performed with the suction method at Akershus Central Hospital, except for those done in combination with a sterilization procedure. The main determinants of complication rates were parity, period of gestation and, for minor complications, whether the patient was treated as an in-patient or an out-patient. ⋯ Complication rates were lowest during weeks 7-10. Out-patients had fewer readmissions, repeat curettages, and infections, than in-patients. There was a tendency to cause a larger dilatation of the cervical canal than was technically necessary.
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The Journal of pediatrics · Jan 1984
Chlamydia trachomatis: important relationships to race, contraception, lower genital tract infection, and Papanicolaou smear.
Chlamydia trachomatis is a common cause of sexually transmitted disease in adolescent girls. Of 366 adolescent patients screened, 15.3% were found to have chlamydial endocervical infections, with an infection rate of 23.3% in blacks, 14.3% in Hispanics, and 10.3% in whites (P = 0.01, excess for blacks). Of Chlamydia-positive patients, 63.6% had a diagnosis of lower genital tract infection, compared with 35.4% of Chlamydia-negative patients (P = 0.004). ⋯ Inflammatory changes on Papanicolaou smears were associated with chlamydial infection (P = 0.0001). Other variables identified as risk factors for chlamydial infection included both a younger age at first intercourse (P = 0.02) and more years of sexual activity (P = 0.02). Chronologic, menarchal, and gynecologic age, biologic age of the cervix, the number of sexual partners in the last month and during a lifetime, and parity were not found to be associated with recovery of Chlamydia.
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Healing is the alleviation of sickness, which includes both medically defined problems of pathophysiology (disease) and personal definitions of not being well (illness). Refugees from Southeast Asia now have a special need for healing because their health problems are changing from those of concern to public health, which are well documented and for which there are known effective treatments, to those that are primarily a personal concern and that are difficult to diagnose and treat effectively because of their chronic nature and their cultural and emotional components. The finding among refugees of physical complaints for which there is no identifiable medical cause is explained by cultural tendencies in Southeast Asia that promote focusing on somatic symptomatology, and by a delayed somatic response to refugee trauma. To prevent escalation of medical intervention, physicians need to be sensitive to Southeast Asians' attitudes toward health and their expectations and apprehensions regarding Western medicine.