(no subject)

Happy birthday, bibliofilen, lsanderson and nineveh_uk!

This interview was a bit whiplashy

Interview in The Guardian with the new President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which may have been the first of the Royal Colleges to have a female President, but then decided that that covered them for the next several decades against any claims of gender bias, and they've only just appointed the second.*

And at one point she's suggesting being very interventionist with patients over obesity**, which made me cringe -

- and also made me go WHUT when later on in the interview:

She has been tremendously influenced by Sir Michael Marmot, who as a leading epidemiology professor at UCL has pioneered research on health inequalities. “Why is it we treat people, only to put them back into the place where they got ill?” she asks. Marmot said that only a third of our health outcomes are attributable to doctors and other medical staff. “Two thirds comes from all the social and epidemiological factors present where somebody is born and lives and where they are educated. It’s absolutely phenomenal.”

Which, you know, might have led her to consider the social etc factors bearing upon 'obesity' - and I note she cites the BMI, which is widely considered a not very useful or reliable gauge.

Of course, one doesn't know to what extent the interview was edited to foreground some things rather than others.

*Thinking about professional cultures, a friend who once worked in a non-medical capacity at that particular Royal College found it had a hideously macho culture and the male bias was not just lingering in dusty corners.

**And over the years of my own career, I had to do with quite a number of women docs who had trained and qualified when the percentage of women admitted to medical school was subject to stringent quotas - I think Regan probably started her medical education just about the point that parity came about - and would say that terrifying virago was quite often an understatement, there was frequently entire internalisation of certain mindsets common to the profession ('There's no knowledge but I knows it').