Women With Physical Disabilities: Achieving and Maintaining Health and Well-Being

By Danuta Krotoski

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557662347
• ISBN13: 9781557662347
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Brookes Publishing Company
• Length: 482 Pages
• Weight: 1.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Important contribution to health of Woman with Disabilities

This important new contribution to the field grew out of a 1994 conference sponsored by the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, The Health of Women With Physical Disabilities: Setting a Research Agenda for the '90s. Women With Physical Disabilities exposes a diverse subject that, until now, has received little to no attention.The volume is unique in that it does not overmedicalize the issues. Rather, it concentrates on the point of view of women with physical disabilities. Many of its contributors are researchers, clinicians, and advocates with disabilities who are in charge of their lives and their bodies and who are active members of the research, health care, and disability communities.The book targets multiple audiences: women with disabilities, health providers, researchers, and families and friends of women with disabilities. Women with disabilities will identify with many of the described experiences, may find some new information and perspectives, and will have reinforced the need to move ahead with strong, loud, and continued advocacy for change. Health providers should benefit by an expansion of their clinical knowledge and by becoming aware of some of the practical and quality-of-life issues of concern to women with disabilities. Researchers will find new ways of analyzing the issues raised and new ideas for broadening the scope of their investigations to ensure that their research has practical applications. There are many important recommendations in the book for new research priorities.The 33 articles cover a range of topics, including an exposition on wellness in the context of disability, an overview of sociodemographics of women with disabilities, a look at the effect of combining disability status with cultural minority status, sexuality, reproduction, contraception, obstetrics, parenting, stress and its impact on physiology, approaches to stress management, bowel and bladder management, and exercise and nutrition programs to enhance physiological and psychological fitness. A few of the articles are technical, but most are easy to read.Carol J. Gill's "Becoming Visible: Personal Health Experiences of Women With Disabilities," eloquently explores experiences of oppression of women with disabilities. She establishes the importance of women protesting their invisibility in the health system in terms of treatment options and in the research that guides those treatments.The chapters on sexuality deal with what is known and not known about sexual response, reproductive health, pregnancy and delivery, as well as the psychosocial issues of sense of self, relationships, parenting, sexual orientation, abuse, gaining access to health care systems, and the politics surrounding the sexuality of women with disabilities. Sandra Welner's article addresses several critical issues, rarely discussed: the negative effects of taking estrogen and progesterone for women with cert