Let’s talk about knowledge sharing.

Knowledge is powerful! And education around health is often gate-kept at a high level. I value learning, I value knowledge-sharing, and collaboration. Knowledge about health should be attainable, actionable, and easy to access and utilize. This is a core belief of mine. We need to share what we know because we never know who will benefit from it.

Medical gate-keeping might be a new term that is being used a lot at the moment but the practice of it is very old. It centers on the belief that people shouldn’t have knowledge or access to any medical information beyond what their Doctors give them. It plays heavily into the Doctor is God complex that we have been led to believe is true. That because someone has a medical degree it means that they are the be-all and end-all of knowledge about our health.

It goes hand-in-hand with medical gaslighting. Invalidating your lived experience and making you believe that what you’ve experienced is all in your head.

This is so often the case for women and mothers.

I have personally experienced this in multiple forms over the years and it has forged a core value in me that knowledge should be shared. That health education is for everyone. Sure, I don’t want to know how to do open heart surgery, but I do want to know what my iron levels are, what the reading means, and what can be done about it.

The only way we can take responsibility for ourselves and our health is to understand it enough to be able to ask questions and seek answers without having to visit 10 different practitioners.