Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life: Achieving Optimal Health and Wellness through Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, and Western Science

barbara — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Though I enjoy a good yoga session as much as any middle-class white woman my age, my natural state is one of tooth-chattering anxiety. Anyone who knows me well could tell you that my yin and yang are not harmonious, but now I have the endocrine profile to prove it—a set of chromosome repeats in my DNA that has manifested itself in serious hormonal disruption, a.k.a. premature ovarian failure, a.k.a. early menopause. Luckily, my family is complete, so my problem is not infertility but the addition of hot flashes and potential bone loss to my list of daily worries.

Enter Claudia Welch's Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life, which promises I'll soon be “achieving optimal health and wellness through Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, and Western science.” Welch applies the Chinese concepts of yin and yang to a woman's sex hormones and stress hormones, respectively. The typically revved-up Western woman's stress hormones tax her sex hormones, causing the Fred Astaire-like progesterone (Welch's analogy, not mine) to stumble, not waltz, with her Ginger Rogers-like estrogen. And once a woman's sex hormones get out of whack, she's dancing her way to ill health—or, to quote a chapter title, she's just “Feeling Crummy.”

To me, a woman whose hormonal problems are rooted in genetics and a not uniquely American malaise, the real balancing act in Welch's book is the eternal push-pull between Western science and Eastern wisdom. I know that Big Pharma has a vested interest in selling me hormone patches, yet there is evidence that hormone therapy is appropriate for women like me who are not undergoing the “change of life” as part of the natural aging process. Still, Welch's advice to adopt dietary and stress-reduction strategies as the first line of defense is rooted not only in Eastern philosophy but also in common sense. More quinoa, less coffee—I got it.

Things get really woolly in the chapters “Birth Control” and “Fertility and Conception,” making me extremely glad that my health concerns lay outside those areas. Asks Welch: “if older women increase their chances of breast cancer, heart attack, strokes, and dementia by consuming synthetic hormones for menopausal symptoms, why is it okay for younger women to take these drugs?” A good question, particularly in light of Welch's observation that hormonal contraceptive tests on men were halted when the subjects' testes shriveled up. “If women's ovaries were on the outside of our bodies, and the negative side effects were actually cosmetically visible,” Welch writes, “would we be less tolerant?”

Welch backs off the patriarchy all too soon, however. Two pages later she's advocating for Natural Family Planning, which she claims lacks the “inconvenient to tragic side effects of most other forms of birth control.” Just ask Michelle Duggar! Her balance must be flawless, because as Welch writes, “establishing reproductive health consists of regulating the cycle and the hormones, having good quality and quantity of yin in the diet and lifestyle, and good quality and quantity of exercise and mental activity to support healthy yang.” I don't watch 19 Kids and Counting, but I can guess that neither yin nor yang come up much.

The takeaway? This book is full of sensible advice for generally healthy (and Quiverfull) women wanting to stave off crumminess. Women with more serious health concerns should probably skip it—reading this book would freak out their yang, which even Welch knows should be strenuously avoided.

Written by: Shannon Drury, March 9th 2011

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:58:00 +0000

By Kathryn Joyce

Beacon Press

When I attended a production of Jesus Christ Superstar as a wee lad of fifteen, I marveled at the song-writing, vocal skills, and daunting cross that loomed amidst a gloomy set design. Being then (and now) agnostic, I was appalled by the religious persecution depicted. I have always been puzzled by the penultimate utterance of Jesus. In the Book of Luke (King James version) 23:34, it is written, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

I can’t forgive the Christian patriarchy movement subjects of this superbly crafted and deeply troubling new book, for their bad faith, cognitive dissonance, and behavioral misdeeds carry heavy consequences. Whether or not they know what they’re doing remains an open question. Kathryn Joyce’s gripping new account, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is about Christians who want literally to take over and remake the world by outbreeding everyone else, warping the minds of school-children, justifying bigotry with transparent illogic, and systematically denying civil rights. That most of the violence is committed quietly and privately against women and girls, most of whom accede to it with joy and penitence, will give even the most devoutly and egalitarian Christian reader pause. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christian patriarchy movement members who feel imperiled by Jews, lesbians, Muslims, atheists, gay males, feminists, foreigners, and the less fecund seem conveniently to have forgotten these words.

The book’s twenty chapters are divided into three gendered parts—“Wives,” “Mothers,” and “Daughters”—in each of which Joyce deftly explores the bizarre ideology and political-economy of feminine subservience. The resulting dystopian communities in real-time and on-line in cyber-space rival those depicted in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can't Happen Here. This ain’t fiction, however. As befitting their understanding and practice of “complementarian theology,” as opposed to the alleged unnaturalness and godlessness of egalitarian gender relations, men and women in the Christian patriarchy movement believe equally (but differently) in the inherent inferiority of Eve (the Original Sin), females (on biological and spiritual grounds), Jezebel (in terms of sex) and women (who have hearts and minds). Sisters are in the process brainwashed into becoming meek and quiet supporters of their brothers, wives are instructed to remain sexually available to their husbands 24/7 (and forego any contraception), and mothers who don’t home-school their children commit them to Satan. Insofar as submissive females require degradation—the more public, the better—virtually every page is painful to read.

Woe unto the woman who proclaims “domestic abuse” or reveals a less than godly husband. Quiverfull opens by recounting the attempted rehabilitation of the disgraced megachurch founder, Ted Haggard, whose initial denial and then avowal of his use of methamphetamine and male sex workers were ripe with possibility. “Complementarian” theology demands that it be not Haggard but Haggard’s wife, Gayle, who bears the brunt of Christian condemnation from low and high places.

Few books have so affected me. This is not the sledge-hammer account I might have written. With equal parts curiosity and compassion, Joyce explains how and why tens of thousands of American women have “chosen” forms of subservience that bankrupt and humiliate them, that crimp their mental development and that hurt them physically and lead sometimes to social leprosy. Each female interviewed firmly and confidently speaks her motivations and explains her anti-feminism while gleefully ignoring the Malthusian outcome of unfettered fertility.

My sole criticism is that Joyce praises the “openness, generosity, courage, and patience” of her key informants with whom she (sometimes, usually, inherently?) “sharply disagreed,” but without revealing any of those disagreements. Joyce’s secular feminist aesthetics and politics are “clear” enough in mind but not in body: how did she manage the flesh-crawling creepiness and awkward silences without every day saying “that’s obviously horseshit” or “I wouldn’t wish this lifestyle on the daughter of my worst enemy?”

That Quiverfull opens with Gayle Haggard’s exemplary case should rouse outside observers of this noxious fundamentalism not to sit on their hands. As she points out, “to follow these ideas to their conclusions can mean, in very real ways [as women], to disappear.”

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 15th 2009

quiverfull

Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life: Achieving Optimal Health and Wellness through Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, and Western Science

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement