Читать книгу Handbook of Clinical Gender Medicine - Группа авторов - Страница 8

The idea for this book came to me gradually during the first years of the new millennium after we had opened the Center for Gender Medicine at Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2001. At our 3rd International Congress of Gender Medicine in Stockholm in 2008, we had a preliminary book meeting and many colleagues seemed interested in the project. At about the same time, the Center obtained funding from Pfizer Inc. to support the development of this book.

An executive committee was formed and its members consist of, besides me (Prof. Karin Schenck-Gustafsson, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm): Paula R. De Cola, RN, MSc, Pfizer, New York, N.Y., USA; Prof. David S. Pisetsky, Duke University, Durham, N.C., USA, and Prof. Donald W. Pfaff, Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y., USA. The journalist Tina Esh, BSc, Tina Esh Communications AB, Stockholm, is the book coordinator.

We first had to decide on the content of the book. High priority was that it should serve as a guide for clinical work. Therefore, most chapters are very clinical while a few are more theoretical or philosophical, depending on the nature of the topic.

The chapters should contain statements about the actual status of knowledge as well as comments about missing facts. We hope that this book will inspire others and lead to more research, more work on clinical guidelines, and more advocacy for gender medicine considerations among groups such as health authorities, ethics committees, editorial boards, research councils, medical product agencies, and biopharmaceutical companies.

It was a long struggle to find a publisher that understood our intentions and shared the beliefs that gender medicine is both for men and women, includes both biological and social aspects of health and disease, is based on top-quality research, and in the future will be a natural part of all research and clinical work. I also believe that our authorities should demand that all medical research include both sexes, show sex-divided statistics, and always analyze results from a sex and gender perspective.

We have engaged authors that are top researchers and top clinicians from Europe, the USA, Canada, Africa, China, and Australia who share my passion for the heightened prominence of gender medicine, and I believe that we have an outstanding book that will contribute to this goal.

Enjoy the reading!

Karin Schenck-Gustafsson, Stockholm