Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to I Palmlund.
Menopause and postmenopause are increasingly defined as a period of health risks that require medical and pharmacological treatment. A social construction of menopause as risk is taking place in popular culture and in the medical field and implies a medicalization of women's lives.
Menopausal and postmenopausal women are a targeted consumer group in the promotion of hormone drugs. The marketing of these pharmaceutical products aims directly at prescribing medical professionals and indirectly at women. The promotion seems intended to creating a collective consciousness that women over 40 need medical and pharmacological treatment.
The experiences of diethylstilbestrol (DES), used as a medication for pregnant women, provide a panorama of the effects of an elevated exposure to xenoestrogens during the development of a fetus. DES was common as pregnancy medication in North America, and several European countries from the 1950s into the 1970s. It may still be prescribed as pregnancy medication in Third World countries. DES exposure in utero has been shown to have carcinogenic, teratogenic and reproductive effects. The medical community needs to be alerted to appropriate treatment of patients exposed in utero to elevated levels of estrogens.
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This article is a report based on presentations at the symposium Effects of Diethylstilbestrol (DES) Medication during Pregnancy at the conference Reproductive Life, 10th International Congress of The International Society of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology (ISPOG) in Stockholm, Sweden June 14-17, 1992. The objective of this symposium, chaired by Eylard van Hall and Ingar Palmlund, was to provide the basis for a discussion of how the risks of DES had been evaluated in different countries. In the general discussion following the presentations everybody present expressed concerns that DES might still be given to pregnant women in many parts of the world, called for measures to alert medical professionals world-wide to the hazards of the use of DES, and requested measures to effect an international ban of DES in medication for pregnant women.