Dr. Bernadine P. Healy, Influential Health Administrator, Dies at 67

[Divine Discontent]

Source: NYT

Dr. Bernadine P. Healy, the first woman to lead the National Institutes of Health and the first physician to lead the American Red Cross until she was forced out in a storm of criticism over flawed responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died on Saturday at her home in Gates Mills, Ohio. She was 67.



The cause was recurring brain cancer, which she had battled for 13 years, her husband, Dr. Floyd D. Loop, said.

In a hybrid career in the largely male domains of medicine and government, Dr. Healy — a cardiologist and feminist — was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, dean of the Ohio State University medical school, a White House science adviser and president of the American Heart Association. She wrote scientific papers and magazine columns, and once ran for the United States Senate.

But she was best known as a tough, innovative administrator who, as director of the National Institutes of Health from 1991 to 1993, championed studies that overturned false assumptions about women’s health. And as president of the American Red Cross from 1999 to 2001, she struggled to coordinate its complex, often contradictory missions of humanitarian disaster relief and the businesslike maintenance of blood supplies.




Dr. Bernadine Healy in 2001.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/us/09healy.html

[Ikonoklast]

1. She was a tough cookie.

People that worked with and for her respected her greatly.

[young_at_heart]

2. She was a regular on Dan Rather when he was an anchor

She always came across as intelligent and socially conscious.

[roxiejules]

3. A feminist...who insisted the NIH also concern itself with women's health

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/us/09healy.html

Dr. Healy’s curriculum vitae was a compendium of academic and professional achievements that in its cold detail omitted a central fact: her relentless attack on the misperception that heart attacks were men’s problems. Heart disease was by far the leading killer of American women, who accounted for nearly 40 percent of its victims. Women’s groups had long sought a greater focus on women’s coronary health, cancers and the role of hormonal changes and therapy.

Dr. Healy cracked the whip on bureaucrats, recruited new talent, expanded the Human Genome Project and reversed policies that, like the medical establishment, had focused largely on men’s health and virtually excluded women from clinical trials. She mandated the inclusion of women in trials wherever appropriate

She began the Women’s Health Initiative, a $625 million study of the causes, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis and cancer in middle-aged and older women. Long after her tenure, it continued yielding important findings. In 2002, it found that prolonged combined estrogen and progestin hormone replacement therapy in postmenopausal women increased risks of breast cancer, stroke and heart attacks.

“Dr. Healy’s stubborn insistence that the N.I.H. concern itself with women’s health was not broadly supported at the time,” Anne M. Dranginis, an associate professor of biological sciences at St. John’s University, wrote in a 2002 Op-Ed article in The New York Times. “Had Dr. Healy not championed research on women’s health, how much longer would healthy women have been encouraged to take hormone drugs?”

[Mimosa]

4. Thanks , RoxieJules

We need to remember Dr. Healy's accomplishments! :)