Voda A M
College of Nursing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
West J Nurs Res. 1994 Oct;16(5):507-23. doi: 10.1177/019394599401600505.
The view that menopause is a disease is dominant in Westernized societies, where menopause has long been considered an estrogen deficiency disease and, more recently, an endocrinopathy. The definition of menopause as disease has its origins in patriarchal views and beliefs about women as defective and imperfect, likened to machines that continually need to be fixed. This view of menopause has overshadowed the concept of menopause as a normal biological event, resulting in increased pressure to prescribe steroid sex hormones and perform surgical interventions on healthy women to prevent disease. Institutionalization of the "menopause as disease" ideology has legitimated, and thus condoned, the use of risk/benefit criteria normally used to assess risks versus harms in sick people. The use of these criteria assumes that acceptable risks for the sick are acceptable risks for healthy, well women.
在西方化社会中，认为更年期是一种疾病的观点占主导地位。在这些社会里，更年期长期以来一直被视为一种雌激素缺乏症，最近又被看作是一种内分泌病。将更年期定义为疾病源于父权制观点以及关于女性有缺陷和不完美的观念，女性被比作需要不断修理的机器。这种对更年期的看法掩盖了更年期作为正常生理事件的概念，导致给健康女性开甾体性激素处方以及实施手术干预以预防疾病的压力增大。“更年期即疾病”这一观念的制度化使通常用于评估病人风险与危害的风险/收益标准合法化，从而得以宽容地应用，而使用这些标准假定病人可接受的风险对于健康的成年女性也是可接受的。
