The 2026 Winter WWB ‘Book Wise’ Pick is a Galentine’s Day Gift to Bring Women Out of the Dark Ages

Meghan Rabbitt: Maria Shriver, an outspoken women’s health advocate, asked me to write this book. I’m a writer and editor for Maria’s weekly digital newsmagazine, The Sunday Paper, and I was at her office in Los Angeles when we started talking about the need for a comprehensive women’s health book. Until now, we’ve had Our Bodies, Ourselves—an incredible resource that has empowered generations of women. Yet when that book was written, women’s health meant reproductive health—what we now refer to as “bikini medicine.” Thankfully, we know better now, and researchers are increasingly prioritizing sex-specific studies to better understand differences in women’s physiology, disease, and health outcomes compared with men.

Meghan Rabbitt: When I interviewed women’s health specialist Lisa Larkin, MD, she told me something that stopped me in my tracks: There’s a “void” in healthcare for many women in midlife—between the ages of 40 to 60—which is when women tend to lose consistent interactions with the healthcare system. During our reproductive years, we’re at the ob-gyn annually (and oftentimes multiple times a year). Then, we turn 40, we’re done having babies, we only need a Pap smear every three years, and we’re busy with work, kids, taking care of aging parents, and more. If we’re lucky and feel pretty good, we don’t go to the doctor as often as we used to.

In short: The dog tends to get more vet appointments than we get doctor’s visits. The problem is that if we want to live long, healthy lives, we need to prevent disease. And to do that, we have to see the doctor for check-ups and health screenings and make healthy changes in our 40s and 50s. “That’s when lifestyle interventions can have the biggest magnitude of impact,” Dr. Larkin told me. “And that’s where women fall through the cracks.” I was also surprised to learn that too many doctors aren’t talking to women about their lifetime risk of breast cancer, which can help you create an optimal breast cancer screening plan based on your individual risk. There’s a simple online test that all of us can take called the Tyrer-Cuzick Risk Assessment Calculator. Then, bring the results to your next healthcare visit to talk about your risk and to see if your current screening plan (for most women at average risk, this means annual mammograms after age 40) is sufficient.

I go to my primary care physician and gynecologist every year, and none of my doctors had ever calculated my lifetime risk of breast cancer. When I took the risk assessment myself and brought my score to my annual well-woman exam, it led to additional screening—my first breast MRI—and an even clearer sense of how important it is for all of us to be educated about our health so we can advocate for the best care.

Meghan Rabbitt: It’s become more important than ever before for us to own our health and be our own best advocates, and I think there are a few reasons for that. For starters, the days of having the same physician take care of us for many years are over. Regularly seeing new-to-us doctors means we must arrive at every visit prepared to talk about our family and personal medical history, provide a list of medications and supplements we’re taking, and be clear and succinct when talking about our symptoms. What’s more, doctor visits are getting shorter, so we have to know how to make the most of the time. One of the doctors I interviewed for my book gave me a great tip: Prepare for every appointment by writing down a list of symptoms or things you want to talk about, then prioritize that list in order of what feels most important or is impacting your quality of life the most. At your appointment, show the list to your doctor and say something like, “I realize we may not have time to cover everything during this visit. Here’s what feels most pressing. What do you think?” This helps you both use the time most efficiently.

Finally, despite many advancements in medicine, women are more likely than men to be dismissed by doctors. It’s not always intentional. I interviewed Karen Lutfey Spencer, PhD, who told me that her research shows that some of the most common reasons why a healthcare provider may dismiss or misdiagnose their patients are a lack of certainty about what the diagnosis is (possibly due to a lack of research on women) and increasing demands on providers that can lead to burnout and increase their cognitive load (which may make them more likely to make decisions biased by sexism and racism).

Meghan Rabbitt: Thank you, Laura! We are living in a time of information and misinformation overload. There’s also a growing number of social media influencers giving health and wellness advice. It can be tough to know what’s legit and who to trust. As a journalist, I know how to vet sources and look at research to make sure the information I’m seeing is backed up by science. But you don’t have to be a professional journalist to take the same skills and mindset I use and apply it to the research you do about your health. A great place to start is to ask yourself three questions when reading any information as it relates to your health:

• Who is behind the information?
• Is it a reliable, authoritative source such as a board-certified physician, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or a major health organization like the Cleveland Clinic?
• Or is it a social media influencer with no health background sharing information based on their personal experience? What is the evidence?
• Does the information have peer-reviewed research backing up the claims—and is that research cited throughout the article, making it easy for you to click through to it? Or is the data lacking?
• What do other sources say? Do multiple experts—researchers, scientists, clinicians—agree on the information being presented? Or does what you’re reading seem to be an anomaly?
• Once you’ve answered those questions, it’s important to talk to your healthcare team about whether the information applies to you. Great clinicians want us to bring information to them, share our health goals, and work together with them to improve our health.

Meghan Rabbitt: My hope for every woman who reads this book is that it gives her the foundational information she needs to take care of herself, the knowledge to help her clue into symptoms that may be a sign of an underlying issue, and the language she needs to feel confident when talking to her clinicians (and family and friends!) about her health.

I know firsthand how difficult it can be to detect when something is a sign of an underlying issue and then talk about it with your doctor. For years, I dealt with debilitatingly heavy menstrual cycles, joking about my week of “hemorrhaging” every month and blaming it on perimenopause after I turned 40. Working on The New Rules of Women’s Health opened my eyes to the fact that my heavy bleeding wasn’t normal, and it ultimately led to a diagnosis of fibroids and a hysterectomy.

So many women can relate to powering through annoying or painful symptoms—ones we often blame on our female physiology or brush off as no big deal, bragging about our high pain tolerance in the process. But this prevents us from getting the care we need and deserve. Many of us can also tell stories of being dismissed by a doctor, not believed when we talk about our symptoms, or even made to feel like what we’re going through is all in our heads. I wrote The New Rules of Women’s Health to give women the information and language we need to feel like accurate, reliable narrators of our health when we talk to our doctors.