Health     

Allison Bingham

At a recent annual conference held in Washington D.C. by the National Center of Health Statistics, I attended a workshop on the most pressing women's health issues in the U.S. I was surprised when I found that of the four presentations, two dealt with lesbian health issues. This was certainly a first, not one, but 2 devoted to lesbian health. I draw attention to one presentation, entitled, Lesbian Health: Current Assessment and Directions for the Future. What I learned is truly a landmark event for those who consider themselves to be lesbian.

The presenter drew our attention to a report that has just been released by the Institutes of Medicine in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The topic of this report is Lesbian Health.

This report is landmark because it illustrates that lesbian health is finally being recognized in our Medical Science community as a legitimate subgroup of women who have special health concerns, elements of risk and represent a sizable portion of the female population in this country.

A special committee was commissioned to compile what the scientific community knows about lesbian health, and put forth a series of recommendations and guidelines for the medical scientific and practitioner organizations in the United States. Below is a brief summary of the committee's findings, however, the report is published in book form and can be purchased for a nominal fee at the following site:

Lesbian Health: Current Assessment and Directions for the Future, Institutes of Medicine, 1999:1-21, National Academy Press, Washington D.C.

http://books.nap.edu/books/0309060931/html/1.html#1

A Summary of the report is provided below and provides excerpts that can be found in the report's executive summary.

Here are some important highlighs from the report's summary (IOM 1999:pp. 1-21):

Despite growing attention to research on women's health over the past decade, the health problems of some subgroups of women have continued to receive relatively little attention. Lesbians are one such group. Although the body of research on lesbian health is growing, much of the research to date has methodological limitations, such as the lack of appropriate comparision groups, that make it difficult to draw clear conclusions about the health status and health risks of this group of women.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Lesbian Health Research Priorities was convened in July 1997 to:

1. assess the strength of the science base regarding the physical and mental health of lesbians;
2. review the methodological challenges involved in conducting research on lesbian health, and,
3. suggest areas for research attention.

WHY STUDY LESBIAN HEALTH?

The committee found several reasons why it is important and worthwhile to direct attention to the study of lesbian health issues:

• To gain knowledge to improve the health status and health care of lesbians;
• To confirm beliefs and to counter misconceptions about the health risks of lesbians.
• To identify health conditions for which lesbians are at risk or tend to be at greater risk than heterosexual women or women in general.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The committee made 8 recommendations for improving the knowledge base on lesbian health:

1. Federal agencies, including the National Institutes on Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, foundations, health professional organizations, and academic institutions should develop and support mechanisms for broadly disseminating information and knowledge about lesbian health to health care providers, researchers, and the public.
2. Public and private funding to support research on lesbian health needs to be increased in order to enhance knowledge about risks to health and protective factors, to improve methodologies for gathering information about lesbian health, to increase understanding of the diversity of the lesbian population, and to improve lesbians' access to metnal and physical health care providers.
3. Methodological research needs to be funded and conducted to improve measurement of various dimensions of lesbian sexual orientation.
4. Researchers should routinely consider including questions about sexual orientaiton on data collection forms in relevant studes in the behavioral and biomedical sciences to capture the full range of female experience and to increase knowledge about assocations between sexual orientation and health status.
5. Researchers studying lesbian health should consider the full range of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity among lesbians when designing studies on lesbian health; strive to include members of the lesbian study population in the development and conduct of research; and give special attention to protecting the confidentiality and privacy of the study population.
6. A large-scale probability survey should be funded to determine the range of expression of sexual orientation among all women and the prevalence of various risk and protective factors for health by sexual orientation.
7. Confernces should be held on an ongoing basis to disseminate information about the conduct and results of research on lesbian health, including the protection of human subjects.
8. The committee encourages development of strategies to train researchers in conducting lesbian health research at both the predoctoral and the postdoctoral levels.