INTRODUCTION - RECOGNIZING THE SYMPTOMS OF DISEASE

Today the medical and health care policy communities are beginning to realize that improving women's health requires the skills and efforts of talented men and women representing the full spectrum of medical specialties and scientific disciplines. Consequently, the focus now is for all physicians, in fact, all health care providers, male and female, to possess a full understanding of how to prevent and treat diseases and conditions in women, to recognize the symptoms of disease in women when these are different from the symptoms in men, and to know when treatments for women differ from the accepted treatments for men.

Unfortunately, past medical research has not provided an adequate understanding of a number of diseases and conditions that affect women and their optimum treatment interventions. For example, cardiovascular diseases are still not widely recognized as the leading causes of death in women, and women often do not receive optimum interventions for cardiovascular disease.

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