Image Placeholder

Health Advocate

Introduction

As part of our continuing support for womens health issues, we’ve brought health advocate Louise Becker to Juliet Stewart. Cancer is one of the overwhelming health issues of our age, affecting every race, creed and income level. There are few things more devastating in life than a cancer diagnosis. Our webmaster has proclaimed his antipathy for the impact cancer has had on his life, “this is a disease that kills the person first, then the body.” So along with our support for the Ashikari Breast Center, we offer Louise’s insightful articles. We will be bringing you covereage of other important topics in the near future.

Juliet

Bridging the Gap

Finding your way to wellness

For as long as I can remember, bridges held a fascination I couldn’t explain. This included pontoons, ferries, even gangplanks! Anything that helped you find a way to the other side. The significance of this only dawned on me later—I was a bridge and had spent most of my life being a bridge. Moving between white and black communities in apartheid times, bridging 2 cultures as an exchange student, and finally with illness, bridging the gulf between Western medicine and other healing ways in order to regain my health.

Now Juliet and I are teaming up with our own version of bridging the gap in the ways that we approach inner and outer health and beauty. We want people to know what they can do to achieve better health, whether it's before they get ill, while they are ill, and especially when they are living life to the full. Susan Sontag famously wrote about it this way:

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the
well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use
only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at
least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”¹

Both Juliet and I have had times when we were in that “other place.” But we’ve always found our way out. Many people struggle to find their way out—especially as youth slips away or illness hits unexpectedly. It’s these experiences about finding your way to the bridge that we’ll be sharing. Sometimes I’ll cite sources I’ve found useful, or the results of a clinical study. Hopefully you’ll learn something that will help fill the gap in your story. Crossing just one small bridge may help move you in a whole new direction, to a healthier place!

Eventually we’ll be offering health and wellness seminars. You’ll more than likely meet my three sisters, all cancer survivors, and hear first-hand what they’ve learned along the way. We’ll also introduce you to all sorts of ways to bridge the gap from sickness to wellness. Until next time...

Yours in good health!

Louise Becker MA
Health Advocate

1. Susan Sontag. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.
©1977, 1978, 1988, 1989 Picador® 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
© Louise Becker 2012

Articles

Is Your A-Team in Place?
Communicating
Finding Reliable Information
Newly Diagnosed?

Biography

Loiuse Becker, MA Lousie Becker. Louise is a health advocate in large part because she and her 3 sisters are cancer survivors. More than 20 years after her own diagnosis, she looks back on what she has learned—and is still learning—and shares it with others on similar journeys, to help them find their own way to wellness.

Louise lives in the New York area and is passionate about multicultural and empowerment issues. In her spare time she enjoys travel, documentary films, and photography.