The Cookeville-Putnam Chamber of Commerce Women’s Conference will teach women how to prioritize their healthcare to build a foundation for wellness.
Certified Nurse Midwife Jessica Tillery will present “Things No One Told You” during the conference. Tillery said women can easily put their own healthcare aside while caring for their families and others around them.
“We were never really taught that it was okay to prioritize ourselves and our health and what’s important to us,” Tillery said. “As women, we are just in these caretaker roles, right? We are daughters that caretake, we are spouses that caretake, of course, mothers, friends, members of our churches.”
Tillery said healthcare often takes a back burner. Tillery said the healthcare priorities discussed will change with each decade. Women in their 20s can begin by finding a provider they are comfortable with and establishing healthy habits. The demands of careers, raising children and other responsibilities can make maintaining that foundation more difficult in their 30s.
“Having your care provider really get you into whatever alley you need to get into to navigate your own personal health,” Tillery said. “That foundation will send right into your 40s where we’re starting to talk about perimenopause, hormonal changes, the things that are going to happen in our body where, all of a sudden, we’re losing muscle mass, we’re putting on weight, but we don’t know why, we’re getting self-image issues, we’re losing some identity, our children are growing, what am I when I’m not a mother, we’re having career changes, all of those things.”
Preventive screenings become another part of the conversation as women move through their 40s and 50s. Tillery said those can include mammograms, pap screenings and colon cancer screenings.
“Really, I think this is going to be most about how to create and navigate the best healthcare and well care for each individual person and taking those little puzzle pieces for you and fitting them together to create the picture that is best for you and your life,” Tillery said.
Tillery said the presentation will also address how women evaluate health information, particularly wellness products and claims encountered on social media. She recommends using evidence-based resources and discussing questions with a trusted healthcare provider.
“I want them to know two things,” Tillery said. “First of all, no one knows their body better than they know their body. And women are the experts. So when you come to an appointment, you are asking for professional opinion and professional guidance and that’s what we should give you, but know that you are the expert. So you speak on your body and let’s work together collaboratively to figure out what’s going on.”
Tillery said another barrier can simply be becoming comfortable enough to have personal conversations and examinations with a healthcare provider.
“If there’s anything that I want women to know when they leave is that they never need to apologize for themselves,” Tillery said. “The hardest thing about an appointment where you have to be essentially intimate, you have to open yourself up, you have to talk about uncomfortable things and you have to have these very private personal exams. That’s really hard to do. The hardest thing is to call and make the appointment and then walk in the front door. But when you walk in the front door, leave your shame, leave any embarrassment, come in empowered to ask all of the questions that you want to ask, get answers, and sometimes the answer might be, ‘Hey, I don’t know, but let’s figure this out together,’ or ‘Let’s bring in another specialty.'”
Tillery said the conference gives women an opportunity to gather health information they can use themselves and share with others in their lives. The conference will be held next Wednesday.
