Therapeutic touch is a double misnomer, since no actual touching is involved, and its therapeutic benefits are illusory. Sometimes she literally shakes the bad energy off her hands at the foot of the bed. While therapeutic touch is justifiably risible, its impact is not. Articles on the subject appear in major nursing journals, and courses in its method are taught at national meetings. At heart, therapeutic touch is a rejection of evidence-based medicine, even of science itself.
Feminism is also the force behind the myth of the second-class medical citizen.
Women represented 62 percent of the more than six million participants in NIH-funded research in 1997. The occasional gender disparity seen in clinical trials comes not from a purposeful exclusion of women, but from the unequal distribution of illness in society. By the same token, studies of Alzheimer's disease must enroll more women than men, since women are at greater risk of developing it. Since women live an average of seven years more than men, and make more doctor visits than men, it would be unreasonable to claim that they are victims of societal health care oppression. And that brings us to the question of race.