Spousal Abuse

Daniel talks with Dr. Jeanne McCauley, chief researcher of a new study on women and abuse. According to McCauley, her study reveals that 1 in 3 women report having experienced physical or sexual abuse at some point in their lives. And that often these women will show up in a doctor's office complaining of symptoms that have no apparent cause. The implications, McCauley says, are that women who are or have been in abusive situations sometimes exhibit other kinds of physical symptoms, such as stomach aches, head aches, dizziness or urinary tract problems that may have nothing directly to do with the abuse but are a result of it. We follow the McCauley interview with a story by Dr. Richard Weinberg, a gastroenterologist, who once had a patient who complained of stomach problems. While there was nothing physically wrong with her, Dr. Weinberg discovered that her stomach complaints were a product of stress due to a rape that had occurred several years before.