Learn about Medical Systems that allow you to take Responsibility for your Own Health. A doctor’s visit isn’t required for most of life’s bumps and ailments.

By learning about herbs and supplements to prevent illness and to overcome chronic illness and learning how to use homeopathy for everyday pains and injuries, women can resume our role as family healer.

When a woman is ill, she gets out of bed and does whatever she needs to do to take care of herself, even if that is to call a girlfriend to bring over chicken soup. When a child is ill, it’s Mom who is there to nurse the child through an accident or illness. And as for the men in our lives, they’re only likely to see a physician when trauma sends them to the emergency room or we push them to a doctor’s office. In short, women hold the key to health care in the family, a role women have held in societies since our tribal origins thousands of years ago.

If you know what the problem is, try Natural Medicine and Treatments first; if you’re not certain, see a doctor.

This website serves to educate women, particularly American women, in health care practices using natural healing therapies. By using natural remedies and therapies, women can provide safer, quicker, and less expensive relief for common injuries and illnesses. Information is empowering, and the knowledge of natural therapies will empower women to resume their position as healer and

Make pharmaceutical drugs with their dire side effects the medicine of last resort, the “alternative medicine.”

The Internet allows women to “gather at the well” and share information and experiences in taking care of their health. In the Discussion/Forum ask questions and hear what others are doing for specific health issues. Health practitioners of many natural therapies, including MDs practicing integrated medicine, will participate by referrals to their expertise. The WMB Shop offers homeopathic medicine, herbal products, nutritional supplements, and books are throughout the site—all to nourish the mind, body, and spirit. Why is this re-direction and education important?

Over 700,000 visits to Emergency Rooms each year are due to drug interactions and side-effects. Another 100,000 Americans die annually due to drugs.

We learned in 2000 from a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that drugs were killing 100,000 Americans every year. The number of 700,000 ER visits caused by drugs is most likely an underestimate, said the authors of the report in JAMA, Oct. 15, 2006.

This doesn’t have to be the plight of Americans’ health. The rest of the world doesn’t depend upon drugs. Citizens of areas of China and India have longer life expectancies than Americans while the annual medical costs in Shanghai and Kerala, India, are the cost of lunch in New York.

U.S. medical education is financially supported by the pharmaceutical industry, and drugs are the only course of treatment American physicians (members of the AMA) are taught. And the FDA, supposedly the federal agency that protects the consumer, is the office that determines which medicines are safe, the same medicines that kill or injure nearly 1 million people each year.

A young graphic designer, told to add the disclaimer to an herbal label: “This product has not been approved by the FDA” commented, “That’s a good thing.” Trust in government regarding our health is dissipating.

We have to reclaim our right and responsibility to take care of our own bodies. In the past 60 some years, since WWII and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, health care in the United States has been so distanced from each of us that self-care has come to be referred to as “self-medication” by many. Only M.D.s are supposedly qualified to tend to my health and your health.

The generation of young adults during WWII, my mom’s generation, now commonly starts out the day with a handful of prescription drugs for each ache and pain. The pills so upset the stomach that they chase the handful with yet another pill for stomach pain.

Only 11 percent of Americans over 50 are living drug-free, using only herbs, supplements and natural medicines to maintain their health. As for the remainder of the nation every time we turn on the television we have the opportunity to “discover” yet another ailment for which the advertiser has a drug to treat it.

The advertising business has always been about creating the problem then offering the solution. It started with Halitosis (bad breath) being the problem and Listerine the cure. Now for every twitch, every sneeze, every inconvenient menses, we’re offered a drug to “cure” it.

The U.S. is the only nation that allows direct to-the-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, and we are given the impression that drugs are the routine and expected course for treating ailments as simple and common as indigestion and headache. The aging population and television ad campaigns are two factors contributing to continually rising drug sales.

The revenues brought into U.S. media sabotages any possibility of critical journalism reporting of health issues. Over 40 percent of television revenues are pharmaceutical advertising so if the news side of the company had any clue on other modes of health matters, the business side will intercept and kill the story.

One book by an eminent scientist that should be read by every American who eats, The China Study, won’t be reviewed by Matt or Meredith any morning soon.

You’ll understand why when reading the book. Learning how to gain optimal health is up to each individual—the FDA and every other federal agency are not on the consumer’s side. The mass media are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry—their responsibility to society of surveying the environment has been pushed aside.

As a population we are seeking alternatives to drugs. When the side-effects can include tuberculosis and DEATH—yes, I’ve heard DEATH as a side-effect—we’d have to be zoned out on the anti-depressants or asleep with the sleeping pills—to NOT be considering another treatments. In the last study of the number of visits/treatments to “complementary and alternative” medical (CAM) practitioners, we made 629 million visits in 1997, paying $27 billion annually for these alternatives—most of it out of our own pockets. This was more visits than to primary care physicians (M.D.s). The alternatives to treatment with pharmaceutical drugs are what is being sought. Gentler, safer means of achieving and maintaining health that does no harm and enables the individual to take responsibility for and care for her own body is what is being sought.

Perhaps the greatest loss in this bankrupt healthcare system is the loss of a sense of physical, and therefore spiritual, self.

When we grow up with full reliance on the opinion/diagnosis of a physician after a 7-minute meeting, our self-confidence, ability, even conceptual capacity to listen to and attend to our own bodies is stunted.

We pay far more attention to our auto engines than our own inner workings. If we hear a new noise in the auto, we check it out promptly. Yet if you have a jolt of pain or a new ache, how likely are you to pay immediate attention? Not very likely, unless you have known chronic illness and know your body well.

The majority of individuals practicing natural medicine today either grew up with parents who for philosophical reasons engaged in medical self-care or they have experienced chronic diseases for which there are no drugs to prescribe. Those with chronic illnesses, if they have the will to survive and to thrive, go outside America's medical establishment and find healthcare from other cultures. Healthcare practiced in other cultures is often simpler, much less expensive, and without harmful side effects; America's new immigrants and women beyond America's borders can contribute to our collective efforts on this website. Most importantly, the individual learns to pay attention to and care for her own body.

This process of self-care also leads to tending to the spirit, which is a natural development from--and also a requirement of--self-care.

Who am I and Why should You spend Time at WomensMedicineBowl.com?

As long as you and I are alive we have the right, indeed the responsibility, to “practice medicine.” When “practicing medicine” is limited to doling out pharmaceutical drugs, yes, restrict it to the M.D.s.

Beyond the use of drugs, each of us must tune into our body and learn how to prevent illnesses and heal ourselves using the whole gamut of natural and holistic medical treatments.

The mantra of WMB is, “I am an experiment of one with anything I take, and I am the only one that matters.” That means you.

Clinical trials of drugs with n numbers don’t matter. When it comes to taking pharmaceuticals we’re all in trials. After they’ve prescribed the chemicals to millions for enough years with an “acceptable” level of side-effects, the drugs move from prescriptions to over-the-counter.

Each one of us is unique and ever-changing. What worked for you last year or last week may not be what your body needs now. Dosages of supplements have to be adjusted according to your body’s response.

Medical care is an art, only occasionally a science. Less than 20% of the treatments done by M.D.s have been “scientifically tested.”

The claim that a natural treatment is not “scientifically proven” is the AMA’s battle cry to keep us dependent on their limited scope for our health.

A more accurate notion: If a supplement or body treatment makes you feel better, it’s working for you.

I am not an M.D.—incidentally, that doesn’t mean Medical Deity. I am a “doctor of philosophy” which is a license to question whether the status quo works, research new routes, and create options. Considering health systems in the U.S., I concluded decades ago the American approach to health is destructive. Now the Internet allows us to do something about this condition as individuals.

My own journey has included growing up with health care outside the health care establishment, learning how to overcome or manage chronic illnesses, and living abroad where I learned other health practices. Perhaps being tied to the obstetrics bed under protest in the ‘50s was a factor in Mom seeking natural health care practices. I grew up with healthcare practices always about 30 years ahead of what the AMA would deign as "legitimate" health care. This began with chiropractic care at age ten after being thrown through an auto windshield.

When Linus Pauling discovered the value of vitamin C in the early 1970s, I was living in central Missouri, suffering a cold every month all winter long that lasted 10 days, landing me in bed 4-5 days a month. Searching for a solution, I added vitamin C to my diet and the colds were reduced to 2-3 a season, lasting 4-5 days and never requiring bed rest. In my early 20s my reading materials included Prevention magazine, and book purchases were largely on wellness.

In 1991, I developed symptoms similar to the flu, but the affliction could last 24 hours or three weeks. After six months and several thousand dollars in tests, my(excellent) HMO diagnosed the problem as Irritable Bowel Syndrome; the MDs advised me that they had no treatment--take OTC meds for the headache and diarrhea, i.e. "learn to live with it."

I did cope with it for months until, in the company of other women on an environmental camping trip with our children's school, a friend introduced me to homeopathy. I made an appointment with a homeopathic physician, was diagnosed and administered one dose of a homeopathic mineral remedy; I didn't experience another symptom of IBS for five years. (After using a camphor balm for achy muscles, and since camphor cancels the effects of homeopathic medicines, I needed a second dosage in 1996.) I soon purchased a guidebook to using homeopathy and a kit of homeopathic medicines. In 1993, when I moved with my three young daughters to Egypt, the book and the kit became our primary medical treatment for every manner of illness, ordinary injuries, and emergencies (none were life-threatening).

At the end of the decade, after a year both emotionally stressful and environmentally taxing, I crashed in 1998 with yet another unknown ailment.

Every test known to the AMA was done, and consultations done with MDs of many specialties. Like blind men trying to describe an elephant, the specialists only know their area of the body.

After two years the ailment was diagnosed as fibromyalgia, and like every other "new disease" that primarily effects women, it was largely believed to be "all in your head." In year 2000, M.D.s still maintained that there is no such disease as fibromyalgia.

Finally having a diagnosis that this was not a "catastrophic" illness (meaning I was expected to keep breathing even if I was in too much pain many days to get out of bed), I returned to the homeopathic physician. But even with constitutional treatments, homeopathic remedies did not alleviate the symptoms. For a few months I paused, not knowing where to turn for healing, then a chance conversation with a neighbor woman reminded me of a medical system I had been aware of since growing up on Okinawa, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Trained as a Naturopath in the US and a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine for 25 years, my new physician listened to my symptoms. Then he added to the list symptoms I'd forgotten!

After two years I'd found a physician who understood the whole body's systems and knew what was not working for me to have these symptoms.

I wept with joy and relief. With seven days of a tea brew of roots and bark and another two weeks of herbal pills, I was well enough to travel to Europe for a consulting project and a holiday. While this illness hasn't yet proven to be cured, it is managed, and the Naturopath became the whole family's primary care physician.

While my health has required continuous exploration and experimentation, my professional career has always involved education and communication. From an initial post-baccalaureate position in educational public relations (for a women's college), my career has evolved to social marketing and, in recent years, behavioral change communication. A doctorate in communication was earned in Seattle in 1987 between the births of three children.

Communication can contribute to a better quality of healthcare in America by educating women to take charge of healthcare for ourselves and our families. I’ve selected books I’ve found especially helpful or enlightening, and products useful on this journey of self-care will be offered. I stay informed on issues that impact our ability to take care of ourselves; this includes reviewing manuscripts related to consumer issues for Medical Care, a journal of the American Public Health Association. You’ll read about the issues, my on-going discoveries-- and yours—in a bi-monthly blog and occasional newsletter.

An imminent panel of natural healthcare practitioners will aid me in facilitating our "gathering at the well." I hope you’ll join us.