How To Use This Site

We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge. –Rutherford D. Rogers commenting on the Internet

Imagine entering your health-related question into the “search” field and actually finding useful answers.
What if there was a friendly person at the other end of your search–not just any person, but a physician with nearly two decades’ experience in women’s health willing to share her knowledge and experience with you for FREE.
There’s more–What if you not only had access to this physician’s knowledge and experience, but also to the collective experiences and wisdom gained from women just like you who had asked the same questions, traveled the same road, and lived through situations just like yours?

Integrating Clinical and Narrative Medicine

You may not realize the degree to which you incorporate your family’s, friends’, and personal stories into your medical decision making. Their experiences may have as much to do with your health care choices as the medical facts pertaining to your situation.

You may turn to your health care provider for medical information but then you often “verify” or “reality test” the information by asking for other’s experiences with various medical treatments. For example, you may turn to friends and family to get the “inside scoop” on questions such as:

Should you have a hysterectomy?
What works for PMS? How do you handle perimenopause?
What is the best way to support your adolescent daughter or son through her or his hormonal changes?
How do you deal with leaking urine?
Where did your sex drive go?

And many other questions.

Narrative Medicine: The Other Half of the Big Picture

Welcome to the concept of Narrative Medicine—the stories that parallel the medical facts. HealthEWoman is my effort to gather in one web site the collective wisdom in our stories, fuse it with established and cutting-edge medical knowledge, to help us all make better, more informed health-care decisions.

Much of the content presented on the Internet has commercial interests at play… information presented as “proven fact” may actually be misleading in order to sell nutritional supplements, “medical” devices and treatments. So how do you obtain balanced, accurate, information with the added benefit of access to other people’s stories to help make your health care decisions?

How Does This Work?

I write brief, factual articles on a comprehensive array of medical topics. I invite and encourage you to respond with your stories. Tell us what was your experience with hysterectomy? Or why did you choose not to have a hysterectomy and go other routes to deal with the issue prompting you to consider hysterectomy? What was your experience with labor–what made up the high and low points? Have you experienced PMS, peri-menopause or other hormone changes that affected your life in unexpected ways? How did you manage these? Or did you just “ride them out”, hoping they would pass as soon as possible.

You can post your story in the Comments relating to a particular topic. Then you can subscribe to comments via email or RSS feed to follow others’ stories and see how the discussion evolves.

With HealthEWoman I hope to make experiences accessible with the context of accurate medical knowledge so women can use that collective wisdom in their health care choices.

Find Your Topic

First, find your topic by entering your question into the search field. If you can’t find your topic using this method, scroll through the categories and browse the posts.

If you still can’t find the answer to your question, start a new topic! Email me with your question/experience to shelleybinkley@gmail.com. I will respond with a brief article that incorporates and answers your questions. Then the discussion ball gets rolling as people weigh in with their experiences on your topic.

Share Your Story

Write as much or as little as you want about your experience with your topic. In doing so you will process your own experience as well as give other women valuable access to information they may not have otherwise have. Your confidentiality is protected as your email and other information will not be distributed to anyone.

Sample topics:

“Should I have a hysterectomy?”
“Home Birth, Patient Choice Cesarean Sections—Crazy ideas? Maybe…maybe not”
“PMS—facts and fiction—how diet and lifestyle really do play a role” “Chronic Pelvic Pain—What are my options?”
“How do I optimize my sexual function?”
“Perimenopause—What is it? What do I do about it (if anything)?”