Click to download the entire September issue as a PDF - Yang-Sheng

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
intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the
United Kingdom, but its infant mortality rate is higher than any
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.
Author pictured in photograph
during third trimester of first pregnancy.
Prenatal Yoga on the Beach ©2005 Ginger Garner.
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