That's right, guys. It will probably be my fault for not being Christian enough.

I just looked up Stress and the Woman's Body. A secular source for the book, here at amazon.com, provides a little sample of his work.

This is our nominee, the head of the clearinghouse for women's health? We're to have a man in charge who thinks that prayer is a suitable treatment for fibromyalgia?

Understand me: If this doctor, in his own medical practice, wants to refuse to prescribe birth control medications to unmarried women, that's his choice. It would be my choice to change doctors, though I'm sure that there are married women who would never know or not care that this was his policy. But to put a man with an attitude like this in charge of health policy for women is outrageous.

Likewise prayer. If he wants to pray over his patients, as long as it's OK with them, it's none of anybody else's business. But the FDA is the Food & Drug Administration, not the Female Devotional Administration.

If prayer is the answer to women's health problems, we will naturally see a reduction of women's health problems. We will die younger and in greater numbers, and so the statistics will show that the incidence of treatment for stress-related ailments (which develop and worsen over time) will indeed drop.

Women have always gone to church more, yet died younger than men until the advent of medical treatments of diseases and better regulation of gynecological concerns. If prayer were so efficacious, it wouldn't have taken modern medicine to reduce women's mortality rate.

Tell you what, fellas: when your wives, girlfriends, daughters, daughters-in-law, and so forth -- all the meaningful women in your lives -- have premenstrual syndrome, why don't you pray over them? Then let me know how the stitches are doing. If they itch, I'll pray for you.

Regards--
Mary Anne