Category: health

  • Abstinence only

    Project 2025, reports Ms. Magazine, would allow only abstinence-based sex education—a notoriously ineffective approach. It also would eliminate the requirement that sex education programs be evidence based.

  • Destroying reproductive rights

    Proposals to restrict reproductive rights pervade Project 2025’s policy agenda, reports Ms. Magazine in its fall 2024 issue. The project, for example, calls for the reversal of a Biden administration policy that requires hospitals to offer abortions in medical emergencies, regardless of state bans.

  • Books as medicine

    Consider books as medicine, says Umberton Eco, Italian writer and philosopher. If books are medicine, “we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few. When you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book…

  • Waiting to die

    “You have to wait until you are certain that a patient is going to die before you can end that pregnancy,” said Dr. Lauren Miller, who was quoted in the spring 2024 issue of Ms. Magazine. She was practicing in Idaho when she made that statement, but she now lives in Colorado.

  • The joy of walking

    The writer Virginia Woolf walked as a cure to depression—and often she came up with scenes and plots for her books during her walks, says Kerri Andrews in her book Wanderers. “Oh, the joy of walking,” Woolf once wrote. “I’ve never felt it so strong in me…the trance like swimming, flying through the air, the…

  • A cure for physical distress

    Walking can strain the body, Kerri Andrews admits in her book Wanderers. However, Andrews writes about Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt’s cure for her physical distress. ”All that was necessary to allow her to move again with ease was a good night’s sleep and fine Scottish whiskey, with which she ‘rubbed my ankle and knee…which did it…

  • Walking is a good use of time

    In her book Wanderers, Kerri Andrews quotes Linda Cracknell about the benefits of walking. Walking, Cracknell says, “helps keep alive older ways of being…. “There was always something to watch, some association to remember, changes in light and sound and fragments of poetry and local lore to think about…. “Long hours walking were not time…

  • Women walking

    I’m walking. I love to walk in the morning. Walking helps me get my day off to a good start. It also helped me survive the pandemic, and it’s calming while we’re preparing to do a major foundation repair and house remodeling. Women have been walking for centuries I’ve discovered while reading Wanderers—A History of…

  • Try sitting and thinking

    It’s okay to do nothing. That’s why I love this quote from playwright Lorraine Hansberry. “Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”

  • Keep swimming–and keep singing

    My friend whose husband has brain cancer visited me. What can we do when something bad happens? Sometimes you can take action to find a solution, but sometimes there is no solution. These words are from a poem from How Beautiful the Beloved by Gregory Orr.  One of the best kinds of friends are friends…