ABSTRACT
If women are indeed to benefit from actions to improve their health, health professionals in the health care community must first benefit from women's voices. First, health professionals assume that health can be divorced from the everyday lives of women and acted upon with purely technical solutions. Second, health professionals assume that women who are illiterate, of low socioeconomic status, and with little or no economic or political power are reluctant or unable to analyze their problems and speak about their health and health needs—particularly regarding a sensitive subject such as reproductive health. Third, health professionals assume that the biomedical model of health, disease and health care is, if not universal, at least universally desirable. The experiences documented in the conference papers support the notion that the most effective way to help improve the health of individual women in an ongoing way is to work with women collectively.
