Word: profets
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...M.D.s, however, who are befuddled by the attention Profet's work is getting, including a prominent story last week in the New York Times. That largely uncritical article included praise for Profet from anthropologist Donald Symonds of the University of California at Santa Barbara -- without mentioning that he is a close friend of the biologist...
...quarter-century later, Profet, 35, thinks she has finally made sense of it all, and in a startling turnaround, it is her views that are bugging the experts. Writing in the current issue of the respected Quarterly Review of Biology, the evolutionary biologist from the University of California, Berkeley, has proposed a radical theory of menstruation that not only challenges accepted wisdom but stands it on its head. According to Profet, a woman's flow is not some incidental event in the reproductive process or just a sign of failed fertility. Instead, it is a mechanism that protects fertility...
...Profet argues that by unquestioningly accepting the traditional view of menstruation, physicians have unwittingly sabotaged a woman's natural defenses with inappropriate medical treatments in cases of uterine infection. "Imagine consulting a cardiologist who didn't understand that the function of the heart was to pump blood?" asks the maverick scientist. "How could he treat you? That was a fundamental question in the 1600s. The same is true today for women's reproductive systems...
...Profet's many admirers in academia quickly lauded the new theory. "She has a brilliant hypothesis and substantial evidence. I'm curious to see if it holds up," says Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatry professor at the University of Michigan. "It's the only serious contender for a plausible evolutionary explanation of menstruation," declares George Williams, an editor at the Quarterly Review of Biology, which is published by the University of Chicago Press. "It is extremely unlikely that her theory is seriously wrong. Her arguments are quite convincing...
Medical experts complain that the glowing press coverage is not justified because Profet got her physiological facts wrong. "While Profet has done a lot of library work, she's not comfortable with all aspects of reproductive biology," says John Rasweiler, associate professor of reproductive biology at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. "When you focus on some of her errors, many things seem to fall apart." Errors? "Every gynecologist knows the incidence of pelvic infections increases, not decreases, after the menstrual period," contends Dr. Charles Debrovner, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University School of Medicine...