Breathe in this Life
Women’s Empowerment in an Age of Illness by Ginger Garner This is the first in a two part series. Health care in America needs a mother/woman-centered approach. American mothers and women are in great need of holistic, patient centered care, rather than disease care centered around drugs and diagnostic testing. Our current approach in women’s health care in the US is not working. In the US, there are more women living in poverty and suffering from chronic diseases than men. (1,2) In addition "the United States has more neonatologists and neonatal Author pictured in photograph intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the during third trimester of first pregnancy. United Kingdom, but its infant mortality rate is higher than any Prenatal Yoga on the Beach ©2005 Ginger Garner . of those countries," says the annual State of the World's Mothers report. Amnesty International’s executive director Larry Cox in 2010 states "this country's extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful.‖ We need change in health care for women in America, and we need it now. I want to share the latest statistics in women’s health from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the American Heart Association. As a woman, I am saddened, but not surprised. The findings provide us with the objective evidence of what we have felt intuitively for some time - women’s health care, its delivery, and the proactivity of women in America to take responsibility for their health - must improve. • Women suffer from more chronic disease and pain than men. (1,2) • Since 1984, more women have been dying from heart disease than men. (1) • More women die from stroke, heart disease, and stress related illness than men. (1,2) • Women suffer more from autoimmune diseases than men, at rates from 2:1 to as high as 10:1.2 • More women than men suffer from arthritis. (2) • Because of the difference in sex-related cancers, women are more apt to get one of the “top 10 cancers” than men. 2 • The leading causes of death in women are (in order): heart disease, cancer, and stroke. More than ½ of all these deaths were attributed to heart disease and cancer. (2) • Obesity has increased in alarming rates since the 1960’s, with over 61% of both men and women now overweight or obese. (3) 26
Yang-Sheng (Nurturing Life)
Volume 1, Issue No. 7