The blurb about women’s health was tucked into a corner of The Guardian and required some tracking on my part to locate the source. It was a report (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in Lancet Public Health, that I fear will largely be ignored, that is a general call-to-action jumpstart for worldwide medical research.
Here’s a summary:
All statistics have shown for years how women live longer than men. Nursing homes and retirement communities are filled with elderly (and sometimes very elderly) women. What new data shows is how women very frequently spend the final decades of their long lives really suffering from poorly treated chronic illnesses: years and years of back and joint pain; chronic headaches, dementia and depression. Before they had become ‘old-old’, both men and women were dying of the ‘usual suspects’, namely heart disease, cancer, lung disease, COVID, but then, as both men and women died off, the surviving females kept going on and on until years later, they finally died of what has been euphemistically termed ‘natural causes’.
But these natural causes came at a price. Decades of general neglect by a health care system (at least in the U.S.) that spends 17% of its Gross Domestic Product on healthcare.
New patients at WholeHealth Chicago are sometimes surprised how much detail our practitioners ask about their family histories. From my own experience, the commonest thread I hear about grandparents is this: A great grandfather dying of a heart attack or lung cancer while in his 60’s (yes, he was a smoker), a great grandmother now in her 90’s confused and in a nursing home. That sentence summarizes what the researchers uncovered. Effective preventive medicine (diet, exercise, cessation of smoking) and we doctors don’t see that many men dying in their 60’s of heart attacks and lung cancer anymore. But the number of old women with chronic illnesses, in chronic pain, depressed and confused, warehoused into Medicaid supported nursing homes remains the same or is on the increase.
The questions that need answering: what can be done for women in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s to allow a healthy, symptom-free and disease-free life well through their 90’s.
We can give you some planning ideas at WholeHealth Chicago: your healthy lifestyle is vital, more dependence on diet and exercise and less dependence on prescription drugs, reducing your stress, an authentic personal environment (yes, many people thrive in midtown Manhattan and yawn with boredom overlooking a ‘scenic’ vista).
In other words, plan ahead and be well.
Herbs for this week
Pipsissewa Extract: you can guess from the name it is mainly used by Native Americans. Mainly used for bladder infections, the dose is one dropperful, four times a day and can be used with the commonly prescribed antibiotics (Macrobid, etc.)
Schisandra Extract: one of the most popular herbs from Chinese medicine, an ‘adaptogen’ with multiple functions in the body. Schisandra energizes qi and shown in several studies to improve energy, work in the body as an antioxidant, detoxifies liver (improving liver enzymes for patient with both acute and chronic hepatitis). Maintenance dose: one dropperful daily.
Be well,
David Edelberg, MD