Customer Reviews

Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing

5 star:		(91)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

Reading this book is so reassuring because it gives you information you can use to make positive changes in your life. I'm such a firm believer in nutrition affecting wellness and this book offers more guidance than I'm getting anywhere else.

It's a complete, holistic guide to women's health that every woman should read. I bought one for my mother and one for my sister. Both are benefiting greatly.

I wish I'd found this book in 1993! I've read dozens and dozens of books in the hope of finding my way to health and happiness and ended up learning everything I needed to know about my body, my emotions and my spirituality from an MD. Beat that.

I highly recommend this book - I started buying copies for the women that I care about before I had even finished reading it!

Required reading for every woman.

This is the first major book to look at women's health systematically from a holistic perspective. My sister, an ND, gave this to me many years ago. I have referred to it many times since I first read it and my friends always want to borrow it. It's a great reference.

If you are looking purely for an objective scientific book on women's health then don't bother with this. There is a lot of scientific info but there's a lot of "non-science" as well. Read the lowest reviews first which fairly summarise the weaknesses of this text. I agree that this book comes across as flaky in places however it is a breakthrough work in terms of systematically exploring the integration of mind and body and the effect of this balance on health.

While I applaud the effort to make people realise how their mental state can impact their health, the other side of that sword is that women feel they are to blame for having the "wrong state of mind" which leads to poor health.

For instance in one story a woman became infertile because, in the author's opinion, she didn't feel her husband was the right person to have children with. If you're pragmatic you can hear this story, consider if it applies to you and discard it if it doesn't fit. But some women could develop a guilt complex over something that is upsetting on its own without the added blame.

Ultimately, the problem with this kind of thinking is that it leads to a vicious worry cycle: you worry that you might not have the right state of mind for good health... and then you worry that your worrying risks your health further! But to ignore this altogether also poses risk. Stress does cause disease and an integrated approach to health cannot exist without considering a person's state of mind.

Because this book provides significant medical information, the reader could be lead into taking all the author's opinions as fact. Take the opinions as just that and you will find the book enjoyable. It is informative and thought provoking.

A friend recommended this book to me. She had told me what the chapters consisted of, etc. So, I was very excited to read it. And it lived up to all of my expectations. This book changed my perspectives on several issues. Northrup gives several "miracle" stories of her patients and tons of medical facts, research, etc. I would not recommend this book to the narrow-minded. But, if you do purchase it, I would recommend taking your time to read it, it is a lot of info to take in. But, it is valuable information for anyone to know (whether you are male or female.)

One of the most empowering most insightful books I've ever read. It belongs in every woman's bedside drawer.

I am writing to tell women.. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. It is a waste of money. Ms. Northrup surely is an embarrassment to the female race. A medical doctor? NOT!! I was particularly disturbed by the statement on pre-ecampsia in pregnancy a result of the "hypochondriac pregnant patient" PLEASE!! Give me a break already. I am as positive as a woman gets and I got pre-eclampsia and NO I am NOT a hypochondriac and NO I wasn't mentally pushing my baby out of my womb early because I didn't want to be pregnant anymore. GIVE ME A BREAK This book should not be on the book shelves. Spare us please. Women are MORE INTELLEGENT than this book portrays us to be..Let's get on with REALITY. !!!!

This book combines sound advice with utter claptrap -- a much more dangerous blend than a book of solid foolishness, as people who recognize her strong areas may not have the background to know when she's talking through her hat. The foolishness here is the old diagnoses "hysteria," dressed up with the verbiage of feminism to make it seem new. It is a toxic enough foolishness to undermine the rest of the book.

It is exceedingly ironic that a feminist would take such a heavily Freud-influenced "blame the victim" approach to so many facets of women's illness. For generations, women had to suffer through male doctors telling them that their real physical problems were "all in their head" or indicative of mental problems. Now we have a female doctor ready to tell us that our cramps or infertility are just manifestations of our unconscious. Sad, really.

The main flaw in Northrup's logic is that she fails to correct for normalcy. Surely *all* women have both positive feelings and fears when it comes to having children, and all young girls have ambivalence and stress about dealing with the realities of becoming a woman in our society; yet only a small fraction of these are infertile or have incapacitating menstrual problems. In any case where the doctor digs for these feelings, she will find them, and *eureka*, she has found the "real cause" of the problem. It's all in your head, dear.

In the world this book was written in, a woman who desparately wants to have children must not really want that, or she would get it. Somehow her body is seen as flawlessly implementing her "real" feelings. Such a perfect body, that is unaffected by the oddities of genetics, environment, chance or other real-world factors, must be wonderful to have. This logic is dangerously close to the old logic that said a woman couldn't get pregnant from a "real" rape, as her horror and fear would cause her body to prevent that from happening.

Additionally, gathering evidence from anecdotes and one's own practice and experience is notoriously poor science -- show me studies that demonstrate that these psychological issues go hand-in-hand with the physical symptoms, that it's more than coincidence and digging up normal feelings and labeling them as causes for serious problems. Show me that dealing with these supposed problems is actually a more successful treatment than a placebo.

In short, I think women deserve more than the same old treatment that the male medical establishment has given us for so long -- treating us to diagnoses based in the doctor's own feelings and philosophy, not in serious study that respects the patient's feelings *and* intellect.

If you are dealing with infertility, do *not* buy this book. The opening line of the section on infertility basically says if you can't get pregnant then, deep down, you probably don't want to get pregnant.

Hello? This is awful, painful advice for someone who's been trying for years to have a child.

I threw the book away -- this section undermined any confidence I might have in the rest of the book.

I can't even watch this woman on PBS anymore.

I found some of the information in this book helpful, but my concern is that this book says that several health problems women have are from deep past hurt. Women can have health problems just from simple illness. I recent the fact that there has to a "deep problem "to have a illness occur- especially with the functioning of women's bodies

As a feminist scholar, I was excited to read this book, especially given that it appeared to have a strong focus on holistic women's health. However, I just could not get myself to continue after she seriously introduced the idea of chakras and energy field/forces. How disappointing to see a medical doctor wander off into an completely unproven and pseudoscientific realm. Discussions of women's health and a holistic approach do not mean uncritically accepting any "spiritual" claims. If these therapies do work, they can probably be explained through promoting psychological wellbeing, or through the placebo effect(which is not necesarily a bad thing if it helps a person feel better). However, given her uncritical acceptance of what is a marginal philosophy at best, I could not trust any of the other information presented. I didn't know if the medical information had been researched/validated at all, or if it merely "sounded good."