Let us pause, for a moment, to remember that one of the great activists of the 20th century died on February 27th, of lung cancer, leaving behind a legacy of critical challenges to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Though many people may not know her work--because she was blacklisted from so many newspapers and magazines for her crusading muckraking---all of us owe enormous gratitude for her relentless pursuit of the truth.

I have suggested elsewhere that the women's health movement was arguably the greatest accomplishment of the modern women's movement. If I am right, then Barbara Seaman was also one of the most important activists and journalists who challenged the over-medicalization of women's lives.

Fiercely skeptical, Barbara Seaman early warned women about the dangers of the birth control pill in her controversial book "The Doctor's Case Against the Pill" in 1969. As a result of her pioneering work and the hearings that followed in the wake of its publication, strengthened warnings appeared on birth control packages.

She never stopped.

In 1975, she helped found the National Women's Health Network, which has constantly acted as a watchdog and addressed dangers to women's lives from new medical and pharmaceutical practices and proposals.

Long before others recognized the danger of huge numbers of middle-aged women taking hormones to ease menopause. Seaman warned women in " Women and The Crisis in Sex Hormones" (2007) and "The Greatest Experiment ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth (2003).

The list goes on. Seaman was a tireless advocate and muckraker who, like all truth tellers before her, relentless pursued the truth behind the spurious claims of those who stood to profit from selling women youth ,beauty, and health.

Perhaps most importantly, Barbara Seaman, like the entire women's health movement, taught each woman women to trust her own intuition, to listen to her own body, and never to trust doctors or commercial companies more than herself.

I am only one person who owes my life to Barbara Seasman's work, because I trusted my own intuition more than the cavalier indifference of physicians. Countless others are alive because this remarkable women worked to make the world safe for women.