Taking Care of You: The Empowered Woman's Guide to Better Health

A practical and extensive resource guide by Mayo Clinic Press for women who want to understand and take charge of their own health, presented in short, easy-to-digest chapters.
 
Women do not always receive the same healthcare as men. In fact, for too long medicine has not recognized that numerous health conditions — like heart disease, stroke, stress, mental health and more — impact women differently than men. Orthopedic surgeon Mary I. O’Connor and medical anthropologist Kanwal L. Haq want to change that by empowering women with knowledge about the current landscape of women’s health, and showing them how to actively engage with their healthcare team.
 
In a groundbreaking publication, Taking Care of You: The Empowered Woman’s Guide to Better Health, O’Connor and Haq have enlisted 111 leading women physicians and health experts from all across the country to create a practical resource guide for women to improve their health and obtain better healthcare.
 
Taking Care of You is refreshingly supportive and jargon-free, with colorful illustrations to help the reader better understand what can often be dense medical information. Its unique approach includes three main sections:

WOMEN AND THE CURRENT HEALTH LANDSCAPE includes topics like:

• What exactly is “women’s health”
• How to find the right healthcare team
• How to use the internet for medical information
• When to go to urgent care versus the emergency department
• And much more

COMMON CLINICAL CONDITIONS IMPACTING WOMEN focuses on 55 non-reproductive clinical conditions that impact women more than men, or differently than men. They include:

• Breast, lung, cervical, and ovarian cancer
• High blood pressure, cholesterol, blood clots and stroke
• Anxiety, depression, obesity and metabolic syndrome
• Thyroid disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis
• Painful sex, pelvic inflammatory disease, polycystic ovary syndrome, urinary tract infection and incontinence, uterine fibroids and abnormal vaginal bleeding

Each chapter is divided into subsections that explain: 

• What is the condition?
• Can it be prevented? 
• How is it treated? Why does it matter to women? (Including differences related to sex, race and ethnicity)
• Questions to ask your clinician and healthcare team
• Pearls of wisdom from clinical experts

Taking Care of You focuses on activities women can do everyday — like eating well, sleeping and exercising — and how to effectively engage in these pillars of health to take better care of themselves.
Taking Care of You is an easy-to-use and accessible guide to be shared between mother and daughter, sister, aunt, and grandmother — an essential resource for every woman, and those who love her.
 

Kanwal L Haq, MS is a medical anthropologist, community organizer, and non-profit consultant. She leads the NYC women’s health programs at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. As an applied-research scientist, Kanwal specializes in community-based participatory research and implementation science focused on health and education. A fierce advocate for systems-level change, Kanwal has worked on several initiatives to build more effective, efficient, and equitable systems of care for women across the world. Prior to joining Icahn School of Medicine, Kanwal worked at Yale School of Medicine, and completed fellowships at the United Nations, Americorps, and The University Teaching Hospital in Kigali, Rwanda. Kanwal completed her B.S. in biological sciences from the University of Missouri and her M.S. in medical anthropology from Boston University School of Medicine.