"Think globally, act locally"

Submitted by louiseds on November 25, 2008 - 7:08pm
Body: 

Hi Karolka and everyone else too.

Your thanks to Alemama made me realise how amazing it is that a woman from Poland would be thanking a woman from Florida (whom she is unlikely to ever meet) for help with a very personal problem. What a topsy-turvy world we live in! Very few of us on these Forums have met each other in person but we share an amazing fellowship that you have now become a part of. This community sustains me in so many ways.

I don't know who first said this, but it is a quote that keeps coming back to my mind about lots of things facing the womankind, the human race and the planet in general.

Now I have been doing Wholewoman for four years I am confident that it works OK for me I am confident to try to connect with my local community and women I know about managing prolapsed pelvic organs rather than having them all hitched up by somebody else (with the irreversible changes that can bring). I still have my setbacks, but so far have been able to overcome them. We all have setbacks occasionally, when our organs decide to move lower again for a while. They always seem to go back up again. That seems to be the way of it.

Very few of us on these Forums have met each other in person but we share an amazing fellowship that you have now become a part of. This community sustains me in so many ways.

Hopefully you will eventually get to the stage where you will be confident enough in your own body to reach out to other women in your community and engage them in a new way at looking at POP. It is not easy. Most people's eyes just glaze over because they are not familiar with a slightly different way of looking at pelvic anatomy, and the benefits it can bring. You might think at this stage of your life it is not possible that you could be helping others, but believe me, it will happen.

Has anybody out there had any successes with getting the word out to other women, person to person, about Wholewoman, or influencing mainstream health professionals in their own communities?

I really think it is important that we challenge the stigma attached to POP, and talk about it openly to receptive individuals, particularly those who are able to influence others. This is the only way that women will realise that they have the resources within themselves to live easily and well with a whole body. It is also the only way that we will ever get women to question the need for pelvic repair surgery in the first place, and eventually get the gyn industry to objectively evaluate their own practices.

Cheers

Louise

Christine

November 25, 2008 - 8:14pm

Hi Louise,

I think it was Hazel Henderson who first came up with that phrase. We heard her speak, btw, about twenty years ago and the whole Think globally, Act locally thing made such a lasting impression.

I gave an intro class to a local New Mexican woman today and, like you, was struck once again by how special this work really is. She’s a 27 year-old and six week postpartum mommy of three with significant SUI. Since age 19 she’s done Mexican folk dancing, which I was amazed to learn today has the familiar male “core” at the foundation of its technique, as do so many other forms of structured movement. She showed me how she holds her body to stomp her feet and jump, and it was so easy to see why she has developed incontinence - bottom tucked under with abdomen tightly gripped.

She tried doing the same movements in WW posture and although it was difficult for her to let go of the tightness in her belly, when she was able to do so her dance became much more powerfully Female. How amazing that her teacher is an older male and that her incontinence started around the time she took up this dancing! I love Mexican dance btw, and believe it will be much more beautiful in natural female posture.

Anyway, thanks so much for the post. Like my client today, when women hear the true story of their anatomy - after they shake their head a few times - they almost invariably respond with “That makes so much sense!” How our mind informs our body is extremely important, and our minds have been “educated” toward a completely faulty anatomy for as long as we can collectively remember. When we get an intellectual grip on how things really are, we begin to live differently in this body - a difference that is both subtle and profound.

:) Christine

Karolka

November 26, 2008 - 2:13pm

Louise,

I totally agree with you - today's world is just amazing. I'm really grateful that my parents encouraged me to study languages, because I can now freely communicate with wonderful women from the USA or Australia, who - at some stage of their lives - felt exactly as I did when I discovered that my body was not the same any more...

It's a pity that most Polish women who discover prolapse are either given instructions on how to contract their pelvic floor muscles or told to consider surgery. I have gone through many posts on different Polish forums. There were woman there who i.e. at six months postpartum had surgeries done. I considered one as well! According to two of the doctors I visited the surgery would be in my case an easy and effective solution....

And then I found this website. I have already started sharing my knowledge, even though POP really seems like a taboo and nobody wants to talk about it. What makes me happy is that my sister and my best friend, who are both planning children in the near future, are aware of the risk and know how to minimise it.

Thank you ladies for creating this community,

Kind regards,

Karolka

louiseds

November 26, 2008 - 9:20pm

Hi Karolka

Mmm, we in Australia underestimate the value of languages other than English. I think the European way of learning other languages is much better. It is a hard slog when you are learning another language. You never realise how important it is until you are shut out of reading or understanding significant information because of the language barrier, and cannot even identify significant information and seek translation of it into your own language.

It is great that you can share this information with other women who are in baby land in Poland. We all have to start somewhere, and that place is really where we are right now, and with the network we have right now.

I think doctors in general are pretty much the same the world over, going with ways that have learned in medical school, even if they don't work terribly well, or have their risks. There are exceptions of course, and for those doctors who use their brains to *think*, rather than just *remember and regurgitate*, it is not a giant leap in the way they understand the female pelvis and its organs, though it does make women independent of the need for medical care for prolapses, which can be a ca$hflow i$$ue for some of them.

Many doctors know about the shortcomings of surgical repairs and are less than enthusiastic to do them, but in the absence of other information, and the awareness that there are surgical repairs available, many women request or assent to surgical repairs, unaware of the risks and longer term problems.

Unless you know that there is something you don't know, you cannot take steps to learn about it. Ignorance prevails!

Unless we inform and educate women before they have babies (and girls from puberty onwards), and get them to question doctors and other health professionals (and including the fitness ... and fashion industries), and educate them about other ways than the existing damaging ways of exercising, holding our bodies, birthing, eating, living our lives, etc, nobody else is going to do it. Women need to take this information as their own and feed it back to the health professionals so health professionals will be challenged in their thinking by all women. To do that health professionals need to want to listen and be curious to understand

Eventually Christine's model must become mainstream because it is true. The only things that will impede that are ignorance, closed-mindedness and the mighty dollar which has a vested interest in women consuming more of the existing products and pouring their dollars and taxpayer dollars into the pockets of those who have a financial interest in the status quo - sorry about that little rant.

Keep learning. Keep getting better.

Cheers

Louise

louiseds

November 26, 2008 - 10:09pm

Hi Christine and All

How about lifting the anatomy chapter and the chapters about surgery and putting them in a condensed form (with all the references) into a smaller book called Wholewoman Professional : A Prolapse Self-Management Primer for Health Professionals.

Saving the Whole Woman is very woman-centred, which it needs to be. I think health professionals need a more concise collection of the information they relate to in their professional lives, ie
* the anatomical basis for the Wholewoman model,
* the precis of the surgical repair techniques,
* figures on their success rates, potential side effects and complication rates and the reference list for this chapter.
* the basics of WW posture principles,
* the basics of the multi-pronged nature of self-managment,
* references to the website,
* 'See' References to the appropriate chapters in STWW which are not in this little book.

I think the chapters would need editing to give it a more objective and factual style. Let the health professionals evaluate the model for themselves and evaluate the hard data about surgical repairs for themselves. It is not rocket science!!

A small, targeted and fact-oriented book like this would be more appealing to health professionals than the consumer book we all love. It may be possible to produce it economically so that it would be affordable for women to give to health professionals so they can read it for hard information in a short time. Few of them have time to read stuff they don't have to read. Perhaps it could be an item in the Wholewoman Center Catalogue that we could pay for, to cover processing costs, then receive it as a .pdf file by email, and could reproduce it for dissemination to our own health professionals at a local level?

What do you and others think about this idea, Christine?

Louise

Christine

November 29, 2008 - 12:24am

This is a great idea, Louise, and I will look into doing some such thing early next year.

The only hitch is that it assumes our doctors really want this information. I understand how difficult it is to contemplate that our caregivers might not want to know something, even (or especially) if it is extremely important and in the best interest of their patients. But how many times have we read stories of women taking the book to their doctor, only to be met with indifference or dismay?

I can see such a book being welcomed into some branches of medicine - family practice for example - but I've experienced enough negative reaction from other specialties to know that it would not be appreciated by the average ob/gyn/urogyn. Why would it? In reality we are asking these doctors to change so much that their practice would hardly resemble anything they are familiar with.

Never did I want to become a rebel or radical with this work...but at some point I had to come to terms with the fact that I would be a much healthier woman today if I had never walked into an obstetrician or gynecologist's office. And I know millions of women would say the same thing if asked. This is not to deny there is some value in the system - the problem is so much is out of balance.

Just how and where to apply pressure to change is at the core of disseminating this information. I'm still awaiting Oprah's call!

Cheers,

Christine

louiseds

November 29, 2008 - 7:45am

Hi Christine

The fact that so many of them don't want to know about it is why it needs to be put in front of them by women who have used it successfully.

I think your summation that the family medicine practitioners would be the most receptive is correct. The advantages of targeting them are firstly, that they are the first port of call, the primary health carers for women who think they may have prolapse, and you don't need to be referred to them; secondly, they don't make money from doing surgical procedures, so do not have a vested interest in divesting women of their reproductives; thirdly, they vainly attempt to help women deal with the negative secondary effects of surgery, being pain, further prolapse, incontinence, sexual problems etc; fourthly because they are part of the medical power structure (as opposed to nurse practitioners who do not have the political or professional clout of doctors); 'fifthly' they deal with the Whole Woman, not just the reproductive bits; 'sixthly' they are more likely to be ordinary people themselves and probably have a pretty good barometer for how women in their communities regard their bodies and themselves.

Cheers

Louise