Why Do We Keep Ignoring Women’s Hearts?

When women die, does anyone ask “How was her heart?”

More importantly, as women live, does anyone ask the women in their lives (on a daily basis), “How is your heart?”

Lisa Marie Presley… Kirstie Alley… Loretta Lynn… Irene Cara… Naomi Judd… A tiny percentage of women who’ve died (in some cases unexpectedly) in the last year… and I am shocked at the tone deaf nature in which we define the causes of death.

Even when the cause of death is a heart attack, there is still no addressing of the deeper, underlying issues that could have contributed to the loss of life sooner than needed to happen.

Which leads me to a question that I keep asking myself:

Why do we keep ignoring women’s hearts?

And I don’t mean just the physiology of the heart. I’m not just talking about the shameful fact that heart disease remains the #1 killer of women, causing 1 in 5 female deaths in the United States.

I’m not even talking about the fact that we know that the signs of female heart attack are different for males, that we acknowledge that heart disease IS a problem for women and, yet, medicine (and society) isn’t focusing on awareness and prevention as strongly as pharmaceutical companies are focused on promoting drugs like Viagra. Let’s not even go there…

But, what I’m talking about is way deeper than a disease.

Who’s asking women (outside of holistic and functional medicine doctors- and not even all of them are doing this): “How are you processing your trauma? Your heartbreaks? Your worries? Your grief? Your emotional pain?”

Who’s asking women “How are your moods? Where are your hormone levels each month? How is your breathing? When do you get rest? What can you do to drop the people pleasing and striving for perfection? How can you stop feeling ‘accomplished’ because you slept less, gave more, and multi-tasked to the point of exhaustion?”

Who’s looking at the ways in which a woman’s heart has to work harder, beat faster, and compensate for every time she holds her breath in because she’s trying to keep her belly bulge from showing or does shallow…