Recovering Health Through Personal Empowerment

Here’s a statement to ponder: The health of a society is directly related to the personal responsibility and role each individual plays in the cultivation of their own well-being.

Let’s try it another way: The more we directly take care of our own health and the less we depend on medical experts, the more likely we are to be healthy.

I am a midwife. I went to school to study pregnancy and childbirth and did extensive clinical training in the field.  I have now been certified for 8 years and have attended and assisted at hundreds of births.

However, my clients do not come to me because I have “the answers”. For the most part and in the significant ways, they already have their answers or are on their way to getting them. They come to me – as a midwife - because I listen to and follow their insights about caring for their own health in pregnancy and their ideas about how to bring their baby into the world.  When there is something that my client doesn’t know about childbirth, we talk through it, they read further information about it, and then together we form a plan. We are collaborators.

Does this approach seem different than your own visits to the doctor regarding your health?

Despite the extensive training our doctors go through in medical school, despite the extensive equipment and technology we have access to for ensuring our health, despite the enormous financial investment in healthcare and health insurance, despite the surprisingly immense amount of time we spend in all of the above services, we, as Americans – by all measurements – are among the most unhealthy people in human history.   

In his book, Medical Nemesis, the philosopher Ivan Illych outlines the ways in which these unhealthy outcomes are not in spite of, but because of our medical system, which has changed our culture to deprive us of the tools needed to care for our own health.  These tools include access to simple technologies, such as dopplers and oxygen tanks.  They also include knowledge and skills, such as maneuvers to deliver a breech baby or awareness of the healing power of plants in our immediate environment.  And they even include the ability for individuals to manage, or even dignify, pain without the use of pharmaceuticals.    

In my work as a midwife, I am trying to restore age-old tools and knowledge and skills. I believe restoring these tools empowers each of us and gives us more control over our own lives. It also, more than likely, makes us healthier and happier.  Worth a try?