Dr. Christiane - Northrup, Empowering women to take - control of their health

By Allegra Mira

PHOTO BY KATE MOLLER
Dr. Christiane Northrup (www.drnorthrup.com) is the author of the best-selling book ''Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.'' She encourages women to become stronger advocates for themselves when dealing with health issues.

Dr. Christiane Northrup is a writer and advocate of empowering women to take control of their health. Her 1994 breakthrough book, ''Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom,'' was a New York Times bestseller that was published in 16 languages. She subsequently wrote ''The Wisdom of Menopause'' and ''Mother-Daughter Wisdom.'' Her work has been featured on a number of television shows, including ''Oprah'' and ''The View,'' and she maintains a Web site called ''Empowering Women's Wisdom,'' which can be found at www.drnorthrup.com.

I began this Innerview by sharing my own copy of an early edition of ''Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom'' with Northrup.

Allegra: This is my original copy of ''Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.''

Christiane: This is one of the real first ones. It's been revised since then.

Allegra: And I went to the local library and I found your ''Creating Health'' tape series, which were very helpful in fleshing out some of the ideas, and suggested practices for a lot of concepts in the book. There were things that reminded me of Louise Hay ' I'm thinking of the affirmations.

Christiane: Absolutely. My new newsletter is published by Hay House, so I now work directly with Louise Hay. And also Hay House does my PBS shows now. So it's this perfect coming together. You know, I used to keep Louise's ''Heal Your Body'' in a drawer in my first office after my residency, and I'd kind of hide it, because you wouldn't want anyone to know that you believed this (laughs) ￴ and now the fact that Louise is going to be 80 next year and that we've become colleagues is a wonderful thing for me.

Allegra: It seems like a perfect match. Someone in college gave me [Hay's] book ''You Can Heal Your Life.''

Christiane: Perfect book. Health is an ongoing process, and we're always moving toward it, but it requires that we break down the old structures that are no longer working. So for instance, by midlife, you'll find that the things that allowed you to become who you are will kill you if you continue. Because your life requires a new structure, a new growth.

So I'm now revising [Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom] for the second time ofull revisions - and I'm a different person than when I wrote that. That was first published in '94, but it took me four years to write it, and two years before that I started to collect the data, so that was in '88. So it's kind of a lifelong work.

Allegra: I'm wondering if healing has an end-point. It seems like such an externally referented idea, to use a term from your tapes, to think that there's a perfect health that we're all heading towards.

Christiane: Well, I think it's an interesting concept, because we all need goals. So it's useful, for instance, to target a cholesterol number. It's useful to target a weight number or the amount of Omega-3 fats you want in your diet. We live in a physical universe, the earth is a physical planet, and so we need to have those goals and references as guideposts, but we also need to know when to let them go.

So, for instance, if your life is going along beautifully and you feel really, really healthy and you go and you have a lipid profile done, and your cholesterol is 200, but your HDL cholesterol - the good cholesterol - is 80, which is really high ￴ what people will often do is focus on the cholesterol of 200, because cholesterol is supposed to be below 200 with today's guidelines.

So instead of focusing on all the stuff that's working, like your HDL, what if what you just focused on was that cholesterol that was too high? You would instantly be giving yourself an experience of being far less healthy than you actually are.

And that's just a trick of the mind - focusing on what isn't quite right. That's a way in which we can use data to beat ourselves up. And it's why there's the balance, always, between how you're really feeling and what the data is￴. It's like being a scientist in the left part of your brain, and then easily moving over to the right part of your brain simultaneously.

And I think all good doctors do that, by the way. Good healers do that. They know when to let go of the external referents and just go back with what's working in the person.

Allegra: It seems like what you're saying is that being able to let go - as a healer or as a person - is a way of moving forward. It's not really a problem to acknowledge something that isn't working. Are you saying that you wouldn't write [''Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom''] today?

Christiane: I would write that book today. It's been a pleasure for me to have written it, but then have the ability to go back and update some of the mindset that woman is victim. There isn't a question that women have been second-class citizens now for centuries. And the only way that that will ever change is for each of us as individual women to get over the behaviors that lock us into the role.

So when, for instance, I talk about how to find a doctor in the newer version of [''Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom''], in the old [version] I say it's good to find a doctor who is simpatico with these ideas.

Today I realize that you can train a doctor to work with you in partnership, whether or not he or she agrees with all of it - because there are so many who are open-minded. Now, some of them aren't, and you're going to know right away. They're the ones where if the woman walks in with this book, the doctor heaves a sigh and says something derogatory about me. OK, that's not the right doctor. But there are more and more of the ones who are really open-minded. So I was able, in the revised edition, which will be out in the fall of 2006, to just change the language ever so slightly, so that there's not this victim stuff in there.

Allegra: That's what I do as a poet - make changes ever so slightly. You begin to notice what power words have.

Christiane: Oh, yes. Each word has a vibration.

Allegra: You start to get the feeling that what you're saying creates your reality.

Christiane: And it does.

Allegra: And it's great to actually witness it working.

Christiane: It is. And that's the whole key to everything about my work. And so you can imagine, though, with the way the physical body works - first of all, we have a Western belief system that says your body isn't even related to your thoughts and emotions. Your body is your body, and we take the body to the doctor. And our emotions ￴ maybe we take those to a therapist or a counselor. But the two of them are in separate universes.

That is not the way it is. Our beliefs become biology, and our biography becomes biology. But if you're trained out of that, you don't see it right away. [Then] once you see it, you can't ignore it. And then you're in the driver's seat of our health and your life.

But that doesn't mean you get out the flail. See, what happens in Western culture, also, is that taking responsibility is equated with being to blame. And being to blame is equated with doing something wrong. You didn't do something wrong, you're just making an adjustment towards something that's better. Always, compassion and forgiveness of one's self have to be part of the process.

Dr. Christiane Northrup maintains a site at www.drnorthrup.com.