Women, health, and knowledge: travels through and beyond foreign parts

The meanings of health for women as a social group are discussed. It is argued that women's perspectives on health give central importance to the concepts of self-determination, coping, power, and control. Health for women is bound up with their experiences in everyday life. Women are also primary health care providers. Medicine, however, dominates women's bodies in ways that conflict with women's own perspectives on their health: In "developed" societies, medical intervention now poses a major threat to women's health. By concentrating on quantitative methodology, most researchers studying women's health have ignored these important meanings of health to women.