FAMILY HISTORY CAN SAVE LIVES
(PRWEB) June 12, 2000
From/Contact: Beth Rowan
Robin Leedy & Associates, Inc.
(914) 241-0086 robinleedy@aol. com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CHART YOUR FAMILY'S MEDICAL TREE
The Life You Save Could Be Yours or Your Child's,
Advises Journalist and Author Mary Alice Williams
WHITE PLAINS, NY, June 8, 2000 - Your family medical history can mean the difference between life and death for you and your children, according to Mary Alice Williams, award-winning journalist, health advocate and author. Williams is working with the Vagisil Women's Health CenterSM (VWHC) on an innovative public education campaign called HERstory, alerting women to the importance of family health history.
"What better present can you give your mother or daughter than the gift of health?," says Williams. "Experts say that more than 100 diseases have a genetic link and yet women often don't know which diseases run in their families. Here's every woman's chance to get the information they need."
Williams says the Vagisil™ HERstory program encourages women to poll their relatives and then record their findings on an interactive family medical tree chart found at www. vagisil. com. Once recorded, women have the opportunity to share their new found data with their families and their doctors, giving everyone a clearer picture of health risks in their gene pool.
"Even discovering that ovarian or breast cancer runs in your family is not a death sentence," says Williams. "It may simply mean more testing like mammograms or transvaginal ultrasound at an earlier age, leading to earlier detection and, hopefully, prevention or cure of disease."
"To not know your personal health history is to not take full advantage of all that today's high-tech medicine can offer you toward achieving a long, healthy life," says Williams, mother of three girls. She said the HERstory program, sponsored by the VWHC, an online resource of feminine health information for women, appealed to her because her mother has Parkinson's disease and some forms of Parkinson's disease can run in families.
"I want my daughters to know what lies in their family's past. Women should be proactive about all phases of their health care. They are the primary healthcare providers in this country. They and their doctors need to use their family history as the basis for the best possible healthcare plan for themselves and their families."
In the past, Williams says, women were often reluctant to talk about certain diseases that are openly discussed today. "Some women don't know that a relative as close as a grandmother had breast or ovarian cancer or that an aunt suffered from miscarriages, or even the age their own mother went through menopause," she says. Medical experts, she adds, now know that these facts can have a direct influence on a woman's personal health strategy.
"The reasons women lacked this information in the past were often cultural or societal," Williams says. "Besides, even if you knew what was coming, what could you do about it? Today's world is different. There will be more opportunities to address inherited diseases and even possibly cure some of them before they appear."
The Vagisil Women's Health Center features a wide range of feminine health information topics for women of all ages. It currently hosts the Vagisil Teen Center and its For Girlz Only Teen Club, a special section in Spanish for Hispanic women, an "Ask the Experts" e-mail selection and a free weekly women's health newsletter with the latest news from women's health headlines.
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