"I want to stay in charge of my health. I want to make the decisions." This is the overwhelming sentiment of all women who are looking for ways to find vital information about their health care choices. In other times and cultures, women were the healers and doctors of their communities, exchanging information and building on their knowledge.

During the Middle Ages, however, much of the wisdom and health information that women had acquired became the property of a patriarchal scientific establishment that disregarded and neglected them. In many ways, this is still the case for women who need to obtain information crucial to their health. Is the modern medical community fulfilling their long-neglected needs? Are their health problems taken seriously? What would they like to change about this system?

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My Body: Women Speak Out about Their Health Care is a provocative response to these questions as well as an acute examination of the tenuous role of women within today's health care system. Ms.

Marion Crook, an esteemed health writer/researcher and community health care nurse, presents compelling interviews with women from various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States and Canada that explore; how they obtained medical information; their experiences using different kinds of medicine - western, alternative, ethnic based, or a combination thereof; their struggles to realize the role of health and illness in their lives.

The author gives specific advice on how women can obtain not only useful health information but also respect and emotional support from a physician.

From her years of nursing experience, Ms. Crook has extraordinary insight into the way in which women use or are used by the health care systems in the United States and Canada and projects what they can do to implement change in local health care facilities. This book will enable women of all ages and cultural backgrounds to educate and empower themselves in every aspect of their health care in order to establish an ideal medical community that thus far has eluded us.

My Body: Women Speak Out about Their Health Care is essential reading for physicians and nurses, social workers, health science educators, and public health advocates, who need to hear and understand the growing concerns of women who want a responsible and responsive health care system.