This groundbreaking book challenges the medicalized approach to women’s experiences including menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause and suggests that there are better ways for women to cope with real issues they may face.

Before any woman diets, douches, botoxes, reduces, reconstructs, or fills a prescription for antidepressants, statins, hormones, menstrual suppressants, or diet pills, she should read this book. Contesting common medical practice, the book addresses the many aspects of women’s lives that have been targeted as deficient in order to support the billion-dollar profits of the medical-pharmacological industry and suggests alternatives to these remedies.

The contributors-psychologists, sociologists, and health experts-are also gender experts and feminist scholars who recognize the ways in which gender is an important aspect of the human experience. In this eye-opening work, they challenge the marketing and science that increasingly render women’s bodies and experiences as a series of symptoms, diseases, and dysfunctions that require treatment by medical professionals who prescribe pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. Each article in the book addresses the marketing of a specific condition that has been constructed in a way that convinces a woman that her body is inadequate or her experience and behavior are not good enough. Among the topics addressed are menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, post-partum adjustment, sexual desire, weight, body dissatisfaction, moodiness, depression, grief, and anxiety.

Addresses popular topics including the thin ideal, the health realities of weight, cosmetic surgery, birth as a medical emergency, sexual desire and menopause, depression, and mourning

Critiques the science and marketing that sees all women’s complaints as symptoms, diseases, and dysfunctions requiring medical treatment

Explains how psychological and social factors affect women’s health and argues for a more well-founded approach such as using talk therapy first

Explains why events like menopause, sexual desire, body dissatisfaction, and grief are examples of issues often not best treated with drugs, but with psychotherapy for permanent resolution

Will appeal to all adult women who might, or do, question current medical approaches and media promises