Looking at health through a gender lens is the first step to a more helpful and personalized approach to healing.

I've found that techniques and practices of energy medicine offer healings that are often quicker, safer, and more effective than many better known healing practices.

Energy healing is based on the supposition that illness results from disturbances in the body's energies and energy fields and can be addressed via interventions into those energies and energy fields.

For me, the term "psychotherapy" is limiting. It implies that we work with mind and emotions, but excludes the body and pays scant attention to the spirit, soul, and broader environmental issues.

Anything that helps us know ourselves more deeply, love ourselves more fully, improve our social connections with family and friends, and engage us more completely with the earth, animals, and environment, is a good resource for healing.

For years we've been treating men and women as though the only differences had to do with our sexual organs. The field of Gender-Specific Medicine was launched by cardiologist Marianne J. Legato, M.D. in 1997 when she recognized that a gender-neutral approach could be harmful to both men and women.

It was long assumed that heart disease manifested the same in men and women. But Dr. Legato found that men may experience the classic symptoms of chest pain that radiates down the left arm. Women often have symptoms including shortness of breath, nausea or vomiting, and back or jaw pain. A gender-neutral approach left many women under-diagnosed and under-treated and as a result many women died needlessly.