At the recent Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare Advocacy Summit and joint colloquium of the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations (#ccckeystone), I met many interesting people with fond memories of their first experiences with the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” book. I loved hearing these stories, about how a small group of friends used the book to perform self-exams, how it motivated women to advocate for themselves or become active in women’s health and rights, and the many other ways in which the landmark book has inspired so many people.

Believe it or not, 2011 is the 40th anniversary of the first edition of the book. As part of the celebration, OBOS is releasing a new edition of the book and hosting a symposium that will bring together women who are culturally adapting and transforming “Our Bodies, Ourselves” into different formats for use in their own countries.

We’ ll be writing more about these events over the course of the next year, but for now, we invite you to share your own stories. If you have an OBOS story – however brief, or however “small” it may seem to you – please share it with us. We love to hear it, and plan to use the stories in conjunction with our 40th anniversary celebration and book release next year.

For more information on the upcoming anniversary and book, including how to support the new edition, check out our anniversary page.  Also check out our history section for lots of cool and interesting information about how the book came to be and the impact it has had over the years.

Last week I had the privilege of attending the Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare Advocacy Summit, followed by the joint colloquium of the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations. Each of these organizations is focused on promoting evidence-based healthcare, through consumer advocacy organizations (CUE),  systematic reviews and meta-analyses on healthcare (Cochrane) and social, education, and justice work (Campbell).

Over the course of the conference, I attended a lot of great sessions, met plenty of interesting people, and learned about many resources of interest. Here are a few from that last category:

• The Campbell Library: freely available systematic reviews on crime and justice, education, and other social welfare topics
• The Cochrane Library: systematic reviews on a variety of medical/healthcare topics, including many beyond the pregnancy and childbirth topics for which they are well known. Requires a subscription unless you are in certain countries or Wyoming; podcasts and some abstracts/plain language summaries are freely available.
• “Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction,” a new book from health journalist Ray Moynihan. I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know how/whether it balances the tendency of pharmaceutical companies to classify almost every woman as wanting sex too much or not enough against the needs of women with serious pain or other issues, but I’m adding it to my to-read list.
• Searchable databases of clinical trials: ClinicalTrials.gov (U.S. focus); WHO search portal (international); metaRegister (searches across multiple databases).
• Justice Health Libraries: from the Lloyd Society, searchable database of health-related research in criminal justice settings, with geographical mapping
• Evidence Aid: Cochrane resources for disaster settings, including the Pakistan floods and Haiti earthquake
• Emergency Access Initiative from the National Library of Medicine: provides temporary free access to full text materials for disaster response, currently for Pakistan floods and cholera outbreak in Haiti
• HealthNewsReviews: expert critiques of health journalism
• Dollars for Docs database from ProPublica: searchable database of payments made by pharmaceutical companies to doctors for promoting their drugs
• Bob Wachter’s blog, Wachter’s World: On hospitals, healthcare quality and safety; Dr. Wachter was also a plenary speaker
• Army of Women, and the Army of Women Health of Women Study: Susan Love gave a plenary talk on mobilizing consumers to engage with research, including the HoW study, an online cohort study looking at the health of women over time
• Open mHealth: a bit of a techy thing, this website describes some ongoing research/projects to embed mobile technology in personal health care. Ida Sim of the project gave one of the plenary speeches.
• Partners in Health: This organization is currently responding to cholera in Haiti; Joia Mukherjee of PiH gave one of the plenary addresses, on their approach to providing care after the earthquake in that country, especially with an HIV focus.
• Additional plenary videos are online here (I haven’t found transcripts), and include former House member Pat Schroeder talking about the upcoming elections and encouraging people to make a difference.

Beyond these resources, I met or saw speak lots of interesting folks working in various forms of healthcare and consumer advocacy, from groups such as the National Women’s Health Network, Black Women’s Health Alliance, National Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender Health, National Partnership for Women and Families, National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition, Childbirth Connection, the Children with Diabetes Foundation, and more. If you were there, say hi to us in the comments!

Tweets from the meeting, full of links, quotes, and other commentary, are archived at What the Hashtag using the tag #ccckeystone; here’s a transcript. Mine are listed under @rachel_w.

I would like to express my thanks to the personnel of the U.S. Cochrane Center who arranged a scholarship and provided support for the meeting. It was a great, useful experience.

This week is National Midwifery Week, in which organizations and individuals promote midwifery and try to raise awareness about midwifery services.

The American College of Nurse-Midwives provides an online toolkit for promoting the observance, including a list of Things You Can Do to Celebrate National Midwifery Week. My favorite suggestion, given my librarian bias: “Request your local librarian to create a special display of available books about the women’s health, childbirth, midwifery, and literature inspired by or mentioning midwives.” Nebraska Friends of Midwives has some great tips for working with libraries on such displays, although they require a bit of advance preparation – you might want to bookmark them for next year!

The organization also issued a press release, and has a series of guest posts at its blog, Midwife Connection. Where’s My Midwife? has additional activity suggestions, and RH Reality Check is hosting a series of posts on midwifery this week, the first from the perspective of an American midwife working in Haiti.

Princeton University is hosting a conference this fall (October 15 & 16), “Open Hearts, Open Minds and Fair Minded Words,” featuring speakers from around the country on the topic of abortion.

The stated goals of the conference are to:

1. Explore new ways to think and speak about abortion.
2. Approach issues related to abortion with open hearts and open minds.
3. Define more precisely areas of disagreement and work together on areas of common ground.
4. Get to know those on multiple sides of the issues more personally.

Speakers will include experts in law, bioethics, medicine, theology, and other topics. The full program is available online, and includes panels on topics including morality, prevention of unintended pregnancy, conscience clauses, Constitutionality, and other issues.

Early discounted registration ends September 8.

I served as an official blogger again this year for the Medical Library Association annual conference, held in Washington, DC. In addition to blogging, I got to do two presentations myself!

Here’s a round-up of the posts I wrote, which generally include some good online resources related to the topics at hand. Various posts may be of interest to other med librarians, individuals with NIH-funded or other federally funded research grants, anatomy instructors, those interested in HIV/AIDS or vaccines or community outreach on health, PubMed searchers, and others:

• Section Program: Vaccine Information – speakers from the CDC, a university, and a public health librarian on vaccine safety and information on communication, myths and misperceptions, outreach efforts related to the HPV vaccine, and other topics
• NLM Theater: MyBibliography for Managing NIH Public Access Compliance – easy visual cues to NIH public access compliance with new features for ease of use
• Vendor Profile: Quertle – a PubMed search alternative that includes relationship searching for focusing results
• Vendor Profile: anatomyEXPERT – a brand new anatomy learning tool with great visuals
• AIDS 2010: Evolution of Information – HIV/AIDS info from clinical, librarian, and USAID/global outreach perspectives
• Notes from the Government Relations Committee – on NIH/NLM funding, and FRPAA (the federal research public access act) – I’m brand new to this committee this year
• Online Content: Videos Now Available from Plenary Sessions I & II [these are available to conference attendees and folks who register/pay for the online content]
• Quick Links: More on That Redesigned Pill Bottle – an example of using good design to improve health, a topic from Daniel Pink’s plenary session
• E-Science: Exploring the Librarian’s Role – librarians on data curation and sharing and helping researchers manage and organize their data and connect it to others

I also have a post at my place on my conversation with an ACOG rep about how they disappear old guidelines when new ones become available.

My fellow medical librarians posted on various other topics throughout the event at http://npc.mlanet.org/mla10/.

My own presentations were an invited panel on informal publication methods, where I spoke about applying some benefits of informal methods such as blogs to our formal journals, and a paper presentation about approaches my library has taken over the past year to improve management of metadata for our electronic resources, including accountability features and distributing the workload beyond our tech services folks. A’Llyn has a post on the open forum on publication methods.

[cross-posted/adapted from Women's Health News]

The Women Deliver 2010 conference is happening in Washington DC today through Wednesday, focusing on global maternal and reproductive health and featuring great speakers from numerous U.S. and international agencies. I just listened to Melinda Gates wrap up and pledge $1.5 billion in new family planning and maternal/child health grants for next 5 years; an archive of these videos is expected to be posted as well.

The conference is streaming live at http://www.womendeliver.org/conferences/-2010-conference/webcast/. You can follow tweets using the hashtag #WD2010, which are also streaming on the webcast page. I’ve set up archives at Twapper Keeper and What the Hashtag? to save tweets with this hashtag for later review.

A couple of upcoming events that may be of interest to readers:

HERS Foundation’s 28th annual conference on hysterectomy – April 24 in New York City
This event will feature a screening of UN BECOMING, “a play about the physical, economic, political, and social impact of hysterectomy,” a keynote speech by U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, and additional speakers on a variety of related topics. You can register online; the conference is free for students with valid student ID.

Women Deliver 2010 conference, “Delivering Solutions for Girls and Women” – June 7-9 in Washington, DC
This global maternal and reproductive health conference will feature Kathleen Sibelius, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and other prominent representatives of U.S. and international organizations. Attendees can register for the whole conference or just for a special one-day technology symposium on contraception on June 8 (marking the 50th anniversary of the pill).

American College of Nurse-Midwives 55th Annual Meeting, June 12-16 in Washington, DC
This annual meeting for nurse-midwives will include a Become a Midwife Forum, a special session that will be open to the public and is intended to help interested individuals learn about midwifery and midwifery education programs in the U.S. The forum takes place from 12-3pm on June 13.

International Center for Traditional Childbearing, 7th International Black Midwives and Healers Conference, “Weaving the Cultural Traditions of Midwifery”- October 8-10, Los Angeles, CA
A call for papers for this conference has been posted to the ICTC’s home page; topics can include all aspects of midwifery, evidence-based training models for midwives and doulas, breastfeeding promotion, public health models, youth programs, and more. Registration info is not yet available.

Our own Judy Norsigian will be a guest on Internet talk radio show “Saturday Mornings with Joy Keys” this Saturday, March 6 from 11:00-11:30 a.m. EST.

Visit www.blogtalkradio.com/joykeys to listen to the show online, and call (646) 929-0368 to ask questions. You can also go to the site now to sign up to receive a reminder via email or text message.

If you’re in New York this evening, you may want to head over to the Housing Works Bookstore Café (126 Crosby St.) at 7 p.m. for a free panel discussion on “marketing embarrassing products to women.”

While that might not sound like the most appealing way to spend a Monday night, consider these three reasons to attend

Panelist #1: Sarah Haskins created, wrote and performed in the “Target Women” series on Current TV, where she spoofed advertiser’s and marketer’s ridiculous ways of selling women products, entertainment and ideas. She now writes screenplays. Funny ones.

Panelist #2: Susan Kim is a playwright, TV writer and author. She co-wrote “Flow: the Cultural Story of Menstruation” with Elissa Stein, and she has two graphic novels, “City of Spies” and “Brain Camp” (co-written with Laurence Klavan) due out from First Second Books this year. Her plays include the stage adaptation of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” and numerous one-acts.

Panelist #3: Allison Silverman launched “The Colbert Report” as co-head writer and later helmed the show as executive producer. She was awarded a Peabody, an Emmy for Outstanding Writing, a Writers Guild Award and three Producers Guild Awards. Her previous writing credits include “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” for which she won a Peabody and an Emmy. Silverman was recently a recipient of New York Women In Film and Television’s Muse Award.

The moderator is Hanna Rosin, co-editor of Slate’s DoubleX and contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Bonus: 100 percent of the profits at this cultural center go to Housing Works, Inc., which provides housing, healthcare, job training and advocacy for New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. Now go with the flow.

For our Wellesley, Mass.-area readers, an upcoming panel discussion on new recommendations for mammography and breast self-examination may be of interest.

Panelists will include Cindy Pearson of the National Women’s Health Network and Ngina Lythcott of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, with moderator Susan Reverby from Wellesley College’s Women and Gender Studies department.

The discussion will take place on Thursday, Feb. 25, in PNW 212 (Pendleton West 212 Amphitheater Classroom) from 5 – 6:15 p.m.

Questions can be directed to ctaylor1 at wellesley dot edu.

I’m thrilled to be at the annual WAM! conference this weekend — so many great activists, writers, journalists, artists and teachers in one (very cool) space brainstorming, debating and learning from each other.

Yesterday I taught a day-long workshop on blogging (note to participants: hope you alert us all to your new blogs soon!). At this moment, I’m in the back row of the session “New Administration, New World Order: The Top Five Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights Stories You’ll Want to Track — And How,” featuring Dana Goldstein, Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, Emily Douglas and my boss, Kiki Zeldes.

Kiki’s talking about the not-quite-inaccurate-but-blatantly-biased condom information available on the CDC website under the Bush administration — the website stressed abstinence and downplayed the safety of condoms. Under the Obama administration, the CDC website has already been updated, and the new message states up front that correct and consistent use of condoms can reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections. It’s just one example of subtle but important changes that can save lives. (Update: TheCh!ctionary.com captured Kiki’s comments.)

The only problem this afternoon is deciding which sessions to attend. I may duck next door to catch Deanna Zandt and Susan Mernit, who are presenting on social media tools.

Read more from the conference at these sites and also check out the Twitter feed …

• TheCh!cktionary.com
• Feministe
• Feministing
• Hyphen Magazine
• Kerri Kanelos
• The Lady Finger
• New America Media
• SusanMernit.com
• WIMN’s Voices

This week, Ft. Worth, TX will be home to the Controversies in Childbirth Conference, described as “a national forum for discussing the challenges and solutions for patients, providers, and payers involved in childbirth.”

Topics for the conference are expected include debate on whether low c-section rates are beneficial, financial concerns for health care providers and facilities, whether “natural birth advocates hurt their own cause,” techniques for vaginal breach births, “centering pregnancy” methods, home birth, transparency, whether non-emergency c-sections are contributing to premature birth and attendant complications and NICU costs, and a number of other hot topics.

Let us know in the comments if you plan to attend – I’d love to hear your reports during or after the sessions.

Another “I’d be there if I lived closer” event …

The Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the nation’s first legal journal devoted to gender rights, is holding a free, public symposium exploring the intersections of gender and terrorism on Friday, March 6.

“The Gender Dimensions of Terrorism: How Terrorism Impacts the Lives of Women” will look at how terrorism affects women’s human rights, as well as the ways in which women put their bodies and lives at stake participating in acts of terror.

The symposium takes place at the Rutgers Center for Law and Criminal Justice in Newark, N.J. Panelists include academics, authors and staff from Amnesty International and RAND Corporation. Check here for more information and to register.

And this is cool — looks like the Women’s Rights Law Reporter will soon have its own blog.

Plus: Over at Feminist Law Professors, Bridget Crawford blogged from the symposium “From the Courtroom to the Mother’s Womb: Protecting Women’s Privacy in the Most Important Places,” which took place today and was sponsored by William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law.