Use the arts to promote women’s health
If you’re looking for something a little different to promote breast cancer awareness month in October, start planning now to host an art show or a theater production in your community. Not only will such an event publicize your center and your focus on women’s health, it’s also a great way to network with other local women’s health care providers who can help produce the show, says Susan Biasella, RN, operations manager for women’s health at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Cleveland.
Biasella says her center wanted to celebrate the month with something unique, not "just the same lectures over and over again." So her first step outside the center’s usual landscape was into the world of art, through the sponsorship of an exhibition of 14 paintings by Hollis Sigler, an artist who lost several family members to breast cancer.
The next year, the center co-sponsored a play about womanhood, Attitudes with Wings, that Biasella had first seen at a National Association for Women’s Health Professionals conference.
The art exhibition, Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers, was first on view at the Susan Cummins Gallery in Washington, DC. To understand the link between the paintings and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you need only read the titles of the works and their "spacers," information posted underneath the paintings that explains what they mean. For example, one work of art has a spacer about self-breast exam and the issue of control in a woman’s life.
The only costs the center incurred were for shipping the paintings to their next site and for refreshments served at the exhibition’s opening, attended by 350 hospital board members, auxiliary members, key women’s health providers, and local city officials. Housed at one of the hospital’s ambulatory centers, the art show attracted more than 700 people during its four-week run, Biasella says.
It also heightened community awareness about breast cancer, says Sherry Reynolds RN, director of Mt. Sinai’s Center for Breast Health. Many people who saw the paintings called for more information or to schedule visits to the center. "The purpose was to give the public the idea we are women-oriented," she says.
Play about women is magnificent’
Art is powerful at the community level, Reynolds says, and she predicts that the center’s sponsorship of such events eventually will increase the number of new patients. She says Attitudes with Wings received a positive response by the women who attended.
"This play is magnificent," says Biasella. "It is two women talking together and reviewing their friendship and the different things they have helped each other through over their lifetimes."
After the hourlong show, a panel of women’s health experts take the stage, and the members of the audience are encouraged to write questions on index cards inserted into their programs. During this panel discussion, an elegant dessert is provided, Biasella says.
In addition to catering costs for the dessert, the center paid $750 to rent a performance hall and covered the actresses’ expenses $4,000 plus travel, hotel expenses, and meals, says Judy McEnany, PhD, the play’s co-creator and a professor in the College of Education at Montana State University in Billings. Those costs are flexible, however, so small groups that otherwise couldn’t afford to sponsor the play get a discount.
To offset the costs, the Mount Sinai center charged an admission fee of $12 for nonmembers and $7 for members, Biasella says. In the lobby of the performance hall, free women’s health information was available, as well as a large backdrop publicizing the hospital.
If you’re interested in a similar activity to celebrate breast cancer awareness month, Biasella suggests contacting the art and theater departments of a local college or university art and ask about exhibits and plays available for sponsorship. You also can learn about your arts community through local art-related tabloids, she says.
• Expect to hear questions about alterna- tives to prescription antidepressants from your patients who follow the health reports in Mademoiselle magazine. The March issue reports that acupuncture relieved the depressive symptoms of two-thirds of the participants in a recent University of Arizona at Tucson study. Acupuncture is the traditional Chinese therapy that claims to move energy along pathways in the body by inserting thin needles at strategic spots.
The report also notes that an herb, St. John’s Wort, yielded as much relief as standard antidepressant drugs in patients with mild to moderate depression. Doses of 600 mg to 900 mg of the herb produced fewer side effects than those often brought on by prescriptions for depression.
Freda C. Lewis-Hall, MD, former advisor to the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD, says research now suggests that a patient’s ethnicity might predict the symptoms that depression presents. African-American women, for instance, tend to experience changes in appetite rather than feelings of extreme sadness or lethargy.
• Tinnitus in your 30- to 40-year-old patients might be the result of hearing loss, reports the March issue of McCall’s. While the constant ringing, hissing, or roaring in the ears that typifies tinnitus sometimes signals the presence of a brain tumor, it’s more commonly a symptom of noise-induced hearing loss.
The increase in hearing problems at young ages, say researchers, is due to our increasingly noisy environment. Culprits include automobile traffic and loud music at entertainment spots or in fitness classes. Even the seemingly innocent "white noise" of dishwashers, kitchen blenders, and battery-powered children’s toys assault the eardrums and can dull hearing well before old age.
Protective measures include simple acts, such as lowering the volume on stereo systems and asking others to do the same. You can advise your patients to invest in ear plugs to shield their eardrums from sound blasts they can’t control, such as those from a power lawn mower. When hearing has diminished so much that patients must consider hearing aids, urge them to get hearing tests from certified audiologists instead of hearing aid dealers.
• Many ills come from too much stress, according to the March Redbook. Maladies such as head- and stomachaches are often the result of excess pressure from everyday tensions at home and work. Stress weakens the immune system and leaves sufferers open to flu and colds.
Women who experience a time of high stress might find their periods are late or even nonexistent because ovulation responds to stress. Patients trying to conceive might monitor the stressors in their lives and those of their partners since stress can lower sperm count and make ovulation erratic.
In helping expectant mothers prepare for labor and delivery, don’t overlook the problems that stress can create. Hormones released during times of high anxiety can reduce the strength of uterine contractions and prolong labor.
• Giving up sex isn’t the only way to prevent urinary tract infections (UTIs) the March Glamour assures women. Alternatives include healthy habits that most women can incorporate into their everyday routines. For example, drinking eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day is a good preventive practice.
Cranberry juice has demonstrated its ability to cleanse the bladder of Escherichia coli bacteria, which cause UTIs. Women who have frequent infections should include a 10-ounce glass per day in their preventive regimen.
Urinating frequently and wiping front to back are essential for bladder hygiene. For women who have recurrent bouts of UTIs, washing the genital area and encouraging their partners to do the same is another important preventive measure.
Three conservative approaches to antibiotics are described, none for longer than two or three months: taking one-half of the normal prescribed dose for a urinary infection every night or every other night at bedtime; taking half a pill immediately before or after intercourse; keeping on hand a three-day antibiotic prescription for use at the first sign of discomfort.
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