Western medicine

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

Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950 – 1980

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:09:00 +0000

By Rebecca Kluchin

Rutgers University Press

In 2004, at the age of twenty-three, I entered my gynecologist's office to request permanent sterilization. My doctor repeatedly refused my request, and would not honor my alternate request for an IUD. I tried changing doctors, but still encountered severe resistance to my wish to be permanently sterilized. Now that the IUD I did eventually obtain will be ready to come out at age thirty, my doctor has still indicated that she will not perform the procedure.

After reading Rebecca Kluchin's Fit to Be Tied, I am left wondering if my doctors' refusals to honor my wishes are, consciously or not, vestigial traces of America's bleak history involving positive and negative eugenics—separate categories for "fit" and "unfit" women. From the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1970s, social, legal, and medical authoritarianism and paternalism combined with white anxiety over losing social dominance in America to result in extraordinarily skewed, disparate policies of reproductive "rights" for white middle class women and poor women of color.

In the post-WWII era, concerns were raised about the population "explosion" and the resulting fear that poor, uneducated immigrants and people of color were "outbreeding" the white middle and upper classes. Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing contraception for married couples, would not be decided until 1965, and few if any women had access to contraception at all. The solution put into effect by medical and legal authorities was to adopt a policy of eugenics: the undesirable minorities, often unwed, sunken into poverty, and with little to no recourse, were aggressively encouraged and often forced into unwanted sterilizations. Women were deceived, lied to, and even legally sentenced to sterilization under the white- and male-dominated cultural paradigm. The worst of these forced sterilization cases were known colloquially in the South as "Mississippi appendectomies," in which women deemed "unfit" to reproduce by physicians entered hospitals for routine surgeries (such as appendix removal) only to later find that their ovaries and uterus had been taken out as well.

Meanwhile, advances in sterilization procedures made the operation quite attractive to middle class white women who wanted to take control of their reproductive destiny. These women appealed to physicians and hospitals in order to obtain tubal ligations, only to find themselves rebuffed. Educated white women of privilege were denied sterilization because it was believed that they should give birth to as many children as possible, despite their own feelings on the matter. Many hospitals developed what was known as the "120 rule" of age/parity: if a reproductively "fit" woman's age multiplied by the number of children she had added up to 120, a sterilization was provided.

Sterilization for men is also touched upon in Fit to Be Tied. Infuriatingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, vasectomies have historically been provided on demand for men with little to no trepidation on the part of medical professionals.

On another personal note, I discussed this book with a friend of mine, who said it sounded interesting but "suspect." He did not know that eugenics was practiced openly in America for many decades, and believed that Kluchin's book was essentially feminist conspiracy theory. This sort of troubling ignorance of history only deepens the importance and necessitates the knowledge of medico-legal authoritarianism over women in America's past. Kluchin's work is straightforward, factual, academic, and exhaustively researched, but not intimidatingly so. It is a highly absorbing read and an incisive, grim but eminently necessary look into pre-Roe v. Wade America.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, October 11th 2009

At Highest Risk

admin — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:25:00 +0000

Directed by Rebecca Rivas

Documentary Educational Resources

Watching this film made me realize all the things I take for granted - for instance, the advanced practices we have in maternal medicine. Overall, At Highest Risk is about the conditions, process and risks Andean women endure, especially in the last months of pregnancy until the birth of the baby. A huge part of the film concentrates on certain laws and solutions that have been put into effect by the community and society in order to avoid complications or, worse, death due to giving birth. Some of these include sterilization, moving to a clinic in the last months of pregnancy and issuing fining those who give birth at home.

The audience is introduced to an expecting mother named Judyth, who expresses concerns with family, friends and others about the birthing process in her town of Ccapacmarca. Each scene furthers us to a better understanding of the health care system in place for these women. At one point in the film, the audience is witness to a birth and the different tradition and ceremonies that take place after. The high point of the film is, of course, the outcome of Judyth’s pregnancy and her choice to combine both western medicine and traditional beliefs. Will she keep the keep the traditional beliefs and does she have complications she feared having?

At Highest Risk was very interesting to watch and brought to mind not just all of the advances in maternal medicine that Western women have, but all the advances in general.

Written by: Adriana Monrreal, March 10th 2007

The Resurrection Trade

admin — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:44:00 +0000

By Leslie Adrienne Miller

Graywolf Press

The Resurrection Trade is a collection of poems that details early anatomical research performed on female corpses from the point of view of the author, Leslie Adrienne Miller, who also provides glimpses of her own life as a daughter, a wife and a mother. There are over 44 poems in this collection, and taken together they create a rich tapestry about “the resurrection trade,” which is “the business end of trafficking in corpses,” and Miller’s experience in writing about it.

Miller conducted extensive research of historical documents and medical illustrations in studying this process, and she includes a multitude of resources in the notes section that were used in writing the poems. (Visiting the notes section is highly recommended while reading through the book.) All of this research lends a weight and authenticity to the poems that reminds the reader at every turn that the bodies, the people described, actually existed. At the same time, the reader is made aware of the way that women’s bodies were objectified in this process.

One poem, the title poem, is divided into stanzas that describe mezzotints, colored prints, Miller viewed. The most difficult poem to get through due to the graphic nature of the topic; this poem depicts corpses in different poses and at different stages of “undress.” For example: “She entire, arm raised, profiled looking left,--unwrapped entirely of skin except for two--breasts, neck and one greeny cream of shoulder.” Miller highlights how the bodies of women are still sexualized in death and dissection.

Equally disturbing but fascinating is “Mother and Son,” in which Miller makes comparisons between the bombing of the twin towers and a mother’s diseased body to help a son understand impermanence. “He’d seen the footage at school that day,--heard the talk meant to help him ‘process,’ and yet,--he couldn’t help himself: he had to ask his mother—to put her body up.”

The poem “Parous in Paris” brings together the reality of studying corpses and Miller’s life. She writes, “I’ve left my only child--home in another country for this walk--into a history of the body of woman--in labor,…the coppery scent of formaldehyde--sticking in my throat, I fight down--the unthinkable news delivered--at dawn via e-mail: someone else--is in my marriage bed,…”

[The Resurrection Trade(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555974635?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1555974635) is a revealing look at the one of the ways women’s bodies have been constructed over time through the eyes of men. The book remains grounded through Miller’s writing of her present day experiences that contain the humanity that is lacking in the tinted prints she has studied.

Written by: Shelby Smith, March 10th 2007